The Dumbshit Singularity

Rick Wilson busts a gut and loses a mouthful of sophisticated adult beverage ;)

Anybody remember the Singularity? This was an idea popular about two decades ago when tech bros were still Our Friends and people still took Google’s motto Don’t Be Evil seriously. Among the bros and enthusiasts, Ray Kurzweil in particular, this was when AI becomes sentient and robots become self-replicating. A boon to mankind!

And then people thought about it for the proverbial femtosecond and went, uhh, isn’t this Skynet from Terminator? The Cylons from Battlestar Galactica? Its place as a giddy pop culture trope evaporated and it slunk back into the realm of humorless nerd-only TED talks. Nowadays nobody’s looking forward to the Singularity.

But there’s another epochal moment that looms ahead of us with an iron determinism. In roughly about two decades, white people in America will become, and will remain, a numerical minority. For many white people, who I am hoping (and metaphorically praying) are the majority, this is like yeah, we know, what else is new. But for a hard, obstinate percentage of them, this is the worst thing ever imaginable to happen. This is their version of Skynet and the Cylons. This is the Dumbshit Singularity.

Where to begin unpacking this? As people — countries, cultures — become more prosperous, they tend to have less children. There’s all kinds of proximate issues among particular groups, but the broad pattern is true universally, particularly in the developed world. China may have offended the religious in the West with their one-child policy in 1980, but that’s when the vast majority of the Chinese population was agrarian, and agrarian societies value large families because it means more help on the farm. Today, China’s rapidly expanding urban populations will face the same problem of aging out and negative population growth as the rest of the developed world, including, most notoriously, Japan, a country resistant to immigration.

All the crap the populist right is spewing around the world to treat women like brood mares, banning abortion, Trump’s absurd lying promise to subsidize IVF because “we need more [white] babies,” Putin’s celebration of a large nuclear family as extolling Russian traditional values, isn’t going to make the slightest dent in this trend. A young couple hoping to have two or three children isn’t going to have five or six and take the hit in their standard of living, and there isn’t enough money in the treasury or from rich people to subsidize that away. Ironically enough, the people most receptive to this message are the recent immigrants, from more traditional, religious cultures who already hate abortion, who are resistant to divorce and who are less educated and generationally closer to an agrarian existence. But these are the very people who are out-breeding “the white race” and leading to the Dumbshit Singularity. Yikes.

The Dumbshit Singularity, needless to say, isn’t a real problem, just the inevitable result of prosperity increasing the options for finding self-fulfillment. Kids are great (even this non-breeder can agree; I adore my nieces and nephews), grandkids are great, but one’s self-worth needn’t be defined by how many of ‘em you can squeeze out over a lifetime. Prosperity creates options, the single most terrifying thing the manosphere despises about feminism. Freedom for me but not for thee.

The fertility fracas is a sideshow. The eldritch horror is when white people become a minority. This can’t be part of a natural and inevitable cultural process or even the result of the dominant culture’s proud achievement of prosperity. It has to be a conspiracy, with Jews behind it (they’re behind everything culturally evil) pulling the strings to flood America with nonwhites and assure permanent Democratic hegemony.

The Great Replacement as a political conspiracy doesn’t really parse, though. Recent immigrants tend to come from traditional cultures, are religious, family-oriented, hard workers, the sorts of character traits the GOP has been extolling my entire life. Prior to the GOP being cannibalized by right wing populism, this was the Bush / Rove vision of a GOP which welcomed immigrants. This was in the ‘12 Autopsy. There is nothing that guarantees even a bare majority of these recent immigrants, naturalized and registered to vote, would vote Democratic, something Democrats have to earn.

Of course as a Democrat I believe that every thinking, moral person ought to be a Democrat but maybe that’s just me ;)

So the Great Replacement isn’t really about politics. It’s about culture. It’s about the blind, existential terror of being a minority group in America. The resonances from this irony could power a city block. Ever since the Roberts Court nuked federal preclearance in Shelby County v Holder because racial discrimination was a thing of the past, the cultural right has been on a crusade to deny the existence of racism. Can’t make white kids uncomfortable by teaching Black History! So if we’ve truly entered at last this charmed utopia of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society, why would it even matter that whites become a minority? Heh. And double heh.

Remember all those books in the 80s about how Japan was eating our lunch? Donald Trump ranted about Japan in those days the way he rants about China today. We haven’t heard so much about that in the new millenium. Japan is a prosperous nation and in no way a basket case like Russia, but it’s been in long-term structural decline for a while now. There are many things that are noble and admirable about Japanese history and culture, but one thing that isn’t is that they’ve always been xenophobic and inordinately proud of being Japanese (ask the Koreans about that). Their immigration policy is extremely restrictive and their native population is aging out. They’ve lost their vaunted edge in electronics and automobiles to emerging nations, their economy suffers with deflation (much worse than inflation) and the yen is no longer a benchmark currency. This isn’t a model that anyone ought to be following.

And yet this is precisely the model that the right wing populists are extolling.

The American economy is going to need more immigrants, full stop.