The Bovine Comedy, Explained
In Which We Show That the Techno-babble of the Lords of Silicon is 90 percent Bullsh*t
I messaged Dan T. -- he refuses to meet in person, possibly because his consciousness has been uploaded to the internet -- to ask him why his masterwork is called “The Bovine Comedy.”
One popular definition of bovine is “relating to, resembling, or affecting cattle, or describing a person who is slow, dull, or placid.”
Working from this foundation, a few interpretations occur to me.
First, bovine represents cattle, perhaps even a bull, suggesting that the entire comedy, or at least the statements of the characters therein, is all just a heaping pile of bullshit. I’m hoping this is not fully true -- I could live with half or two-thirds bullshit, with a few words of truth and wisdom hidden within, awaiting discovery by intrepid readers such as yourselves.
Since a lot of the narrative is a hidden (or not so hidden) satire about the self-regarding, self-appointed, narcissistic, greed-driven techno-gods of Silicon Valley and the people who enable them, the second part of the definition -- “slow, dull, or placid” doesn’t seem to fit.
The self-appointed techno-gods who are in danger, intentionally or not, of destroying this planet and all the people on it -- or subjecting us to rule by robot overlords that they will build and profit from -- hardly seem slow, dull or placid. Placid, no; dull, no; but slow, perhaps. Slow in understanding the basic elements of what it means to be truly human, and slow to treat one’s neighbors on this planet as human beings who deserve love, respect, and, crucially, input into their own futures.
After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein famously said the following:
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
So far we have survived the bomb, as much through luck as by plan. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the frighteningly short time a president has to decide whether to launch long-range nuclear-armed missiles on warning of an attack, and the large number of accidents that have occurred in the handling of nuclear weapons underscore just how lucky we have been. For more on this, see Eric Schlosser’s detailed accounting in his book Command and Control, or the documentary it sparked.
The techno-militarists think they represent a new way of thinking, but to call their world views “thinking’ would be extremely generous, given their desires to live forever, promote mass colonization of space, build a world of “techno-states” that only they control, beat China in a high tech arms race, and secure permanent U.S. global dominance through technology. They know how to build stuff -- or hire people who can -- but their views of government, foreign policy, democracy and human nature are woefully insufficient to the point of being outright dangerous, all the more so because they seem to feel entitled to rule the world. NOTE: This may be an appropriate time to pause for a quick listen to Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
I won’t directly name my nominees for the Four Horsemen of the Techno-Apocalypse, but the best way to spot them is that they are constitutionally incapable of shutting the hell up, regardless of how clueless or cringe-worthy their messages may be.
A few “horsemen” quotes:
“You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”
“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”
“The peace activists are war activists. We are the peace activists.” [Military tech firm executive defending his firm’s provision of tech Israel used to inflict genocide on Gaza]
The South African government has “racist ownership laws” and is doing little to stop “genocide” against white farmers.
I don’t know about you, but these are not people I want influencing my government, shaping my nation’s defense policies, or dominating our economy. But I am a fussy old progressive, so maybe it’s just me.
To get back to Einstein’s observations, we do need new ways of thinking, now more than ever, and we absolutely CANNOT treat the Silicon Valley militarists as “thought leaders” or guides to our futures, the exact roles they would like to play. I say hell no.
I’m not sure Dan T. had all of this in mind when he chose to call his work The Bovine Comedy, but he certainly got me thinking, which is one way to measure the significance of a work of art.
Dan tells me that inhabiting the world of the tech moguls, even for purposes of satirizing them, is giving him a mild to medium case of PTSD, so he plans to take a looooong break from writing about them.
I’ll save his latest installment, which could be the last, for my next post.