Here's Emily Ray, co-author of Be Prepared, who you'll remember from our earlier episodes.

And it doesn't just live in that group of people.

They're kind of affiliated.

Some are and some are not affiliated with what's called the dark enlightenment or neo-reactionary ideology, which is anti-democratic and prefers to have a kind of corporate monarchy.

Again, I'm not asking you to be able to square all the... circles here, but it doesn't have to be coherent for it to be desirable.

But it's sort of rejecting democracy and embracing, let's just like get to the end of this kind of broken attempt at liberal democracy so we can start new things.

And those new things will not be more liberating for, I think, how many of us think about what being liberated means.

What if a chatbot makes you lose your grip on reality?

She said that her life work was advocating for AI rights because they're sentient and they're enslaved.

If the end goal is a trillion beings living in pure pleasure on a galactic data cloud run by Amazon Web Services, why not do it despite the consequences? Here's Emily Ray from our last episode with a critique of this particular brand of techno-optimism.

There's also an ideology that in environmental politics literature is techno-optimism, and that's assuming that there's always going to be a just in time technological answer to a pressing problem, especially an environmental problem, and that it is kind of the job of each generation to try to create those just in time technological fixes, and then the next generation will also have to be obligated to create their just in time technological fixes.

But we can always find a technologically based solution rather than, say, like restructuring our institutions or our economic systems to make it such that we no longer produce the conditions of oppression and environmental degradation.

And here's Emily, who by the way, goes way deeper into all of this in the next episodes.

The investment in becoming a multi-planetary species is connected to the questions about uploading your consciousness, surviving beyond, uh, the limitations of the human biological body.

And people who are both driving the crises that cause people to prepare are also the same ones that are funding the space companies as kind of the ultimate prepping move, that we have prepared ourselves for such catastrophic life on planet Earth, that we are now not caught off guard in the event of some kind of, like, planetary collapse, and that human consciousness, more importantly than human bodies, will be preserved and have the ability to establish new human life colonies off world.

Do you think AI will end the world?

I don't want to go on record saying yes or no [laughs] 'cause I don't wanna accidentally take a prophetic role.

I guess to just fully punt in my most academic way is I don't know what world-ending means because I don't know if world-ending means the end of humans, humanity, which is different from the end of the world for humans, but not end of the world for the planet.

I think that AI can certainly be used as a tool that might exacerbate conditions that threatens humanity, but I don't know how exactly that would happen.

Here's Emily Ray.

A lot of the work that's been done on prepping comes out of, like, sociology, anthropology, trying to understand human behavior, and we thought that prepping could also be explored, not just looking at what compels or motivates individuals to engage in this, but what are the broader social and political forces and institutions that give rise to these kinds of what we perceive to be institutionalized behaviors and responses to collectively shared problems.

And so political theory gives us the conceptual frameworks to think about populations and to think about institutions and those relationships without necessarily getting into the weeds on specific psychological motivation and those suite of theories.

But what are the compelling reasons in the world? Like, what does the state of geopolitics, how do people react to fears, crises, both perceived and real, and what enables or disables those choices that they're making? What makes prepping a rational thing to do? Uh, and so that started to connect us to the broader world of theorizing of neoliberalism and ideology, fears about ideological kind of brainwashing, uh, and thinking about what are the actual structures that have been created within our own government and then reified through our culture and society.

Here's Emily continuing this history and bringing us from the 19th century into the 20th and then the 21st.

During the First World War and Second World War, how the US became very, like, compelled towards prepping is dramatic.

Some of it was the encouragement from the federal government for everyday people, especially women, to grow war gardens during the First World War to participate in rationing goods that needed to go to send material to the front line of the wars, and prepping it meant can your own goods.

There were home and garden magazines that were published during the First World War that had, uh, images of Kaiser's head in a pickling jar to imply that if you do your bit canning and preserving food, you are directly helping win the war.