Personal utopia vs. Immanentizing the eschaton

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My mind was a little bit prepared this time. I love how Ethan Mollick shares his thoughts. And I love Bruce Sterling (the Sci Fi author who asked me a question about heuristocrats at etech 2006, a proud moment).

So while lazily browsing Mollickland yesterday, I came across his "immanentizing the eschaton as a business model". Taken literally, which I know is hard, it is really about making the world heavenly (for whom?) by means of a technological singularity. Or accelerating the End of Days by means of complete destruction. Pick your favorite.

But then, with my mind freshly imprinted, I found a link in my inbox this morning to a lecture by Bruce Sterling at the Technology Biennial in Turin in April 2024. It is an ode to Torino as a kind of personal utopia. Utopia is a version of eschaton (the one that National Review founder William F. Buckley railed against in "don't immanentize the eschaton"). Referring to the headless end of Sir Thomas More, Sterling writes "If somebody says the word “Utopia” to you, you should think of an adult woman smuggling the severed head of her father away from an execution." But then there is a distinction between public or political utopia, the one that decoupled Sir Thomas from his head (that, or his opposition to Henry VIII's decoupling from the Catholic Church) and personal or private utopia. He brings up the delightful example of Alexander Calder, who built his own personal utopia by creating his own brain extensions, including his own forks or bread toaster.

I am not sure that "personal eschaton" is an expression we want to add to our lexicon. But as a business model, immanentizing personal utopias by empowering individuals to discover and design, that makes a lot more sense.

Chance sometimes favors the unprepared mind too

This guy does not look open-minded.

In fact, when this picture was taken, I (yes, it’s me, I haven’t changed a bit) had just started my first semester at École Polytechnique Polytechnique, a French science and engineering college, and I was already convinced that learning more science was probably a waste of time as I was dead set on applying to the French School of Civil Service (ENA). I was studying economics, history, literature and law on evenings and weekends to prepare for the competitive exam. But in the spring and summer of 1989, two serendipitous events happened in sequence that would change everything.

The first was an aesthetic shock: around April, I found incredible beauty and elegance in the most unlikely place, Introduction to Probabilities 101 by the extraordinary Jacques Neveu (1932-2016). That I would find such a topic enticing was not part of the plan. By June, I was beginning to question my commitment to prepare for ENA. And then, in July, another shock.

I was at UC San Diego for the summer programs, having picked (before April) US Constitutional Law as my summer course. Vivek Badrinath had orchestrated quite a coup, getting our college to cover the cost of the program. So I went but failed to find the classroom on Day 1, wandered around campus, ended up in the wrong place (corporate law), ran away and took refuge at UCSD’s bookstore. Browsing random sections, wondering whether my life was still on track, I stumbled upon a thick double-volume set entitled Parallel Distributed Processing (Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition), by David Rumelhart and James McClelland. Why, I am not sure. But what I know is that I didn’t attend any classes at all for the rest of the program. I read (I tried to read) the two books, understanding about 5% of their contents, but feeling like I had found meaning in my life: connectionist models and neural networks, a perfect combination of cognition and applied math.

Upon my return, I gave up my plan to apply for ENA and embraced neural networks as the love of my professional life. For a while.