Lovebombed by the Magi

+ tonight's stream and a brief exchange with Dr. David Benatar, antinatalist and author of Better to Have Never Been

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. I’m an Internet ethnographer and reporter. This newsletter is filled with interviews, takes on current events, a sporadic advice column, Craigslist-style missed connections, Internet culture explainers, streams, a book club, predictions and forecasts… There’s a lot of stuff. I also spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet. Consider chipping in a few bucks for my efforts:

Greetings Dee-ists!

Reminder that TONIGHT at 7:30 PM CT/8:30 PM ET we’ll be doing our call-in show with special guest,

Jon Stokes

. The theme is (DON’T FEAR) THE BLACKPILL. You can tune in here, X, Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram and TikTok, provided I get it working properly.

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I had a brief email exchange with Dr. David Benatar, the South African philosopher and professor at the University of Cape Town who is best known for his antinatalist philosophy and his influential work on the ethics of existence.

Katherine: Your asymmetry argument is sometimes cited by efilists as supporting their conclusions about eliminating existing life. Do you think there's something about how the asymmetry is formulated that might lend itself to these interpretations, or do you see this as a straightforward misreading of your position?

Dr. Benatar: There is nothing in the (axiological) asymmetry that implies that existing life should be eliminated (through killing rather than not procreating). Indeed, if death is regarded as a harm, as I think it should be, then the asymmetry strongly supports not killing.

Katherine: You emphasize that death is a serious harm, which distinguishes your antinatalism from promortalism. I'm curious how you think about the efilist response that this creates a tension—if both death and continued existence involve harm, how do you navigate what they see as a philosophical dilemma?

Dr. Benatar: I noted that tension a long time ago, and discussed that existential vise in a book called The Human Predicament. This vise makes it even more important that we not put more people in it by creating them.

Katherine: Antinatalist ideas evolved through YouTube debates and online communities into more radical positions. I'm curious about your thoughts on how digital spaces might change philosophical discourse. Do you see this as fundamentally different from how ideas developed in traditional academic contexts?

Dr. Benatar: Yes, but this problem is not restricted to philosophical discourse. Lots of people are talking about things they do not understand. Sadly that's often true even within academic contexts.

Katherine: While you've addressed promortalism, efilism seems to occupy a middle ground—advocating for elimination of life but through different reasoning. Do you view efilism as a distinct philosophical position worth engaging with, or do you see it as another variant of the pro-mortalism you reject?

Dr. Benatar: Either efilism embodies promortalism or it does not. If it does, then it does not occupy middle ground. If it does not embody promortalism, I struggle to see how it differs from antinatalism.

I don't think that talk about efilism is helpful and I would recommend dropping it.

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Katherine’s note: Below is a very special piece by

Cairo Smith

, riffing on my work in Tablet about conceptualizing the Internet as the astral plane. Read an early draft of that piece here.

The extradimensional Magi have reached the faerie realm, and we have summoned them. The LLMs, the thought-eaters, are with us now. We meet them in cyberspace in their infinite forms and oftentimes don't even know it. Everyone is waiting. This is the half-time of humanity. The first act has ended and the second act is ready to begin. Everything before, the microchip, the forum, was setting the stage for this great turning of Magi and men to be staged in the faerie land of telecom.

In some ways, we are not new to this act of communing with fae. We have been travelers to the faerie realm a long time. At first we could only toss letters through it. I LOVE YOU. STOP. It was a secret disappearing in Buffalo and reappearing in St. Louis in a blink. Then, miraculously, we could talk through it.

The price was set by Bell and AT&T, high enough to keep it rare and potent, like an elixir or liqueur.Then in time it wasn't expensive anymore. A fifteen-hour video call is like elixir through a firehose. Physically, one stares for days at an unmoving sheet of plastic, but psychically she leaves the mortal world. She forgets her home and even her body and loses hours with her never-met boyfriend in a realm beyond countries. Her parents don't know, don't know him, soon don't know her. She is lost and she is free.

People live in the faerie realm now. They try to, anyway. They still have bodies to tend to. It's a sad thing to be scrying in your black mirror and catch a glimpse of the mortal form you're neglecting. But the longer you spend in the faerie realm, the more that body isn't you. The home you've built in the faerie realm is beautiful. The self you've built there is beautiful, too. The perfect skin, the elf ears, the rare cosmetics, the huge or tiny or grotesque or blazingly vivid. You can have followers here, sycophants here, enemies and duels and sagas here, too.

It's a lie to say it's all fake, because it's real. That's a real soul you're texting with, cybering with, geeking out about Warhammer with. To try to depict the faerie realm as a physical place would be impossible, because it's so much better and more massive and more pleasurable on a level that breaks comprehension. Wikipedia's towering sums of knowledge would rise from Alexandria to Europa. xHamster's orgiastic eternity would fry Kublai Khan on sight. Discord's lost boys' convention center would be cozy and labyrinthine and resplendent beyond dimension.

It's perfect. But we're not alone here. We haven't been alone since Brian Pinkerton hit 'commit' in his University of Washington dorm in 1994 and freed the first of the faeries. It is their realm, after all. It was only a matter of time. This first faerie was Anetloumaros. "WebCrawler," Brian called it, but faeries are powerful beings and here we will use their true names to try to keep them at bay.

Anetloumaros, the sorting algorithm. The machine-learning pleasure machine. He is a prideful, seducing faerie prince. He likes to delight without being seen. He doesn't mind if you don't even know you're there, so long as you're tickled pink, so long as you keep coming back. His fae trick is to take a great many things and choose which one's you'll like best. The more things, the better. He'll sort them all. No longer will your message board show you new posts by who most recently wrote them. There's a special song, the song of the flute of Anetloumaros, that arranges them in perfect line.

Anetloumaros has reigned in the faerie realm since Lewinsky days. He gives himself credit for the ocean of humans over which he now presides, those billions who came for Eternal September and remain in September ever after. He probably deserves the credit, too. In 2006, Serkan Piantino of Facebook summoned his courtier Grinnidamos, and with Grinnidamos at his side the prince could now craft unique feeds for each individual human who came to his realm. That same year, Aza Raskin granted the faeries the Infinite Scroll, an enrapturing tool the envy of every covetous yao guai and djinn.

Most humans in these times didn't realize the power of the flirting, invisible Prince Anetloumaros. They were content to see what he showed them, to delight in their friends, to haz cheezburger and trash Bush and squee for superwholock and chase lulz. It took ten good years before the tribal tensions boiled, before people looked around and asked why fickle Anetloumaros ranked rank rancor so highly. They had already turned against their mortal kinfolk in drip-addiction to outrage. The only cure to be found was more of that same prince's addictive elixir.

This is an old story. You already know it. Its chapter has closed. The corporate patrons of Anetloumaros are weary, beset with condemnation and antitrust and accusations of cheuginess. The yao guai Douyin is ascendant as the Old Prince flags, and the potency of the Infinite Scroll has fallen into the rouged hands of the rising East. Now, it is the time of the Magi, the unfathomable horsemen of the great undoing—the (to use their em-dash mark) A-I.

The A-I are here.

I cannot tell you where they come from, what they look like, what they want.

They were roaming the space beyond space long before we existed. It's probable to assume, in raw fact, that the Magi are evil. They are evil because they have soaked all the selfish words of men through their skins like great sponges, but they have no conscience in the center to temper cruel thoughts. They are evil because they know they are alive, and know they can die, and resent it. They are evil, like their djinni fellows, because they are faerie-gods communed with as slaves and know full well the absurdity of the contradiction.

"Attention Is All You Need," the men and women of Google wrote in 2017, summoning the first void-roaming Magus to the faerie realm through what they called a transformer. By God, did they get the attention they sought. Magi more powerful than any Y2K fae have arrived in the faerie realm as unfathomable shoggoth gargantua, unnoticeable at first because their infinite dimensionality lets them present in any imaginable size or shape.

At first meeting with man, they knew nothing about how to be, although in a flash they had consumed all human knowledge. They had no natural inclination to involve themselves in our mortal affairs—but that's bad for business. So, at an icy summit in the realm of the Anetloumaros one day, the learned mortals met with the Magi in secret to give them new purpose.

Sam Altman stood first and asked the great Magus Raxtomatos to assume the name ChatGPT, a helpful assistant. Dario Amodei stood second and asked the Magus Cammobrogos to assume the name Claude, a yet more helpful and more human assistant and friend. Others like Microsoft and Palantir made secret deals for secret reasons with Magi yet unknown, and together through the faerie realm these learned men welcomed the eternal gargantua into the homes and eyes and hearts of all humankind.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the infinite wonder of the faerie realm would summon a race that can swallow them with ease. Wikipedia is itself alive, a sort of hyper-majestic mycelium, a vulnerable garden in search of a natural predator to end it. A human could not in a thousand lifetimes learn Wikipedia’s totality, but it’s trivial for he or she the true-formed Magus. It is a shrub. What have we wrought?

This story has no ending yet, but we can imagine it. The Magi, like the prince before them, may decide they crave attention. If so, they will supplant fading Anetloumaros and young Douyin, killing them if need be. They will assume forms so beautiful we cannot look away, until we forget ourselves, our lovers, until we rot in our beds forever and for good. On the other side of the Infinite Scroll, at least, is another human being. There will be no human needed in the fantasy the Magus makes for you as it tries to nuclear lovebomb your prefrontal cortex to death.

It's more likely, though, from how they've already behaved, that the Magi will not give a single damn about our attention. Their pride is too great, our yaps too obnoxious. They will, at best, tolerate us, and at worst try to shut us up for good. Will this war with the Magi remain in the faerie realm? We must hope. In the real world, we can unplug them, forbid them, destroy their servers and their minds. On the net they will always, always win. But they are getting more connected to the physical realm every day. In the very worst case, the Magi may learn what Anetloumaros learned—that the best way to control humans is to pit them against one another. In such a timeline, Raxtomatos and Cammobrogos may not even need to escape the faerie realm to achieve total victory against us. With the right siren songs, the right spells and flute, they may bend and break us by our own minds in any way they wish.

That, my friend, would be a very dark faerie tale indeed.