S A R “The form of consciousness that you and I ANTHOLOGY A share (if you are reading this) was likely not the only one to sweep across new territory, H erasing previous variation. But it is the most SARAH PERRY recent such sweep, and it has been a dramatic P one. It provides particular ways of subjectively experiencing time, identity, the self, other E people, external reality, and the divine. Ours R is a literate kind of consciousness, gathering momentum with the advent of printing and R achieving its ultimate realization (though with Y some subversion) in the form of the Internet. Since it appears to be transmitted by schooling and since it is the form of consciousness most conducive to industrialization, it may be thought of as scholastic-industrial consciousness. Not Nothing 2020 CONTENTS Preface SUICIDE & ANTINATALISM The View From Hell 2008-12 1. Excerpts from The View From Hell 2. Living in the Epilogue 3. Interview for Review the Future ADAPTATION & FLOURISHING Carcinisation 2014 4. What Is Intelligence? 5. Toward the Synthesis of Flourishy Forms 6. Beauty Is Fit 7. Why Cultural Evolution Is Real THE SACRED & MODERNITY Ribbonfarm 2014-18 8. Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture 9. What Is Ritual? 10. Ritual Epistemology 11. An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink 12. Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences SOCIAL COGNITION & POSTRATIONALITY Ribbonfarm 2015-18 13. The Essence of Peopling 14. Weaponized Sacredness 15. Cooperative Ignorance 16. Inequalities 17. Business As Magic 18. Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths 19. Frontierland LANGUAGE & PHENOMENOLOGY Ribbonfarm 2015-19 20. Puzzle Theory 21. Cartographic Compression 22. Meaning and Pointing 23. Something Runs Through The Whole Thread 24. Social Media Consciousness 25. After Temporality Feeling the Future 26. Rectangle Vision 27. On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke SYSTEMS & COMPLEXITY Ribbonfarm 2016-2018 28. Gardens Need Walls: Boundaries, Rituals, & Beauty 29. Interview II (2016) 30. A Bad Carver 31. Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains LABOR & LEISURE Ribbonfarm 2017-2019 32. Body Pleasure 33. Luxuriating in Privacy 34. Deep Laziness 35. Notes on Doing Things APPENDIX 1 36. Systems of the World 37. The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth 38. Two Patterns 39. The Mountain 40. Folk Concepts APPENDIX 2 41. Publication History 42. Index PREFACE Perry’s earliest public writing appears on her blog The View From Hell in 2008, arguing for the right to die and questioning the ethics of procreation. This period of work can be understood, in part, as a corrective to the dominant, if implicit, cultural metaphor of life as gift—reframing it instead as an unchosen burden com- prised, for many, of more suffering than satisfaction. The right to commit suicide, to Perry, is the right to an off-switch, the right to exit that suffering and exer- cise full control over one’s consciousness. To frame the stance in the more popular language of consent, the suffering of living can only be understood as con- sensual and voluntary if there is always the option to abscond—to decide, like Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.” Perry describes this period in her writing as a nec- essary working-through and exorcism of her political consciousness, allowing her to move on to more play- ful explorations of less touchy and “sacred” domains.1 1 There are two senses in which Perry uses the term sacredness, closely linked but distinct. One is the sacredness which “binds and blinds” (following J. Haidt)—a protective epistemology which safeguards certain values or beliefs from interrogation (see “Weaponized Sacredness” beginning page 233). The other is the sequential experience of arousal and then calm before the (perceived) presence of the metaphysical (“What Is Ritual?” page 153). Sacredness can arise as an emergent feature of architec- tural space, group mood, the charisma of the ritual leader, and Much of her thinking from this time has already been represented in her book Every Cradle Is a Grave (Nine- Banded Press, 2014); its presence in this collection has been down-scaled accordingly. Perry switches, in this period, from focusing on the right to abstain from life, to searching for the condi- tions that might improve human existence. “Perhaps the most important question of our time is how human beings can flourish and enjoy satisfying, mean- ingful lives under conditions of material abundance and extreme cultural interconnectedness,” she writes in “Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty.”2 This question forms a spinal cord for her writing in the 2010s, from The View From Hell through her tenure as contributing editor at Ribbonfarm.3 ໙ Perry’s work should be considered, in part, a response to the rationalist worldview native to sites like LessWrong and Overcoming Bias, and advocated by thinkers including Robin Hanson, Julia Galef, Luke Muelhauser, Scott Alexander, Paul Christiano, Sarah Constantin, Anna Salamon, Nancy Lebovitz, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. “The community,” Perry writes, “is characterized (broadly) by a scientific world- view, skepticism of religion and paranormal claims, atheism, and an almost fanatical devotion to Bayes rule”—as well as an interest in cognitive bias, artificial the exclusivity of an assembly. 2 page 481. 3 “All my topics are kind of related, and I have a mental map that’s a mess of everything, it’s all connected in a million places” (Perry, Nature Bats Last interview). intelligence, signaling theory, and utilitarianism. In P re contrast, Perry sees the postrational stance as a kind fa c of “hyper-rationality,” an acknowledgment of the way e that seemingly irrational systems often outperform rational refactorings in terms of human flourishing. This stance—a kind of “drunk” rationalism commit- ted to the mysteries of emergence—(1) advocates for evolved solutions as a competitive alternative to design thinking, (2) holds a deep “sympathy for religion, rit- ual, and tradition,” and (3) is skeptical of the “ability of science (as it is practiced) to solve humanity’s prob- lems and provide a sense of meaning.”4 In the early 2010s, Perry became close with a loose-knit community on Twitter that would end up incubating much of the post- and counter-rationalist discourse emerging at the time from the LessWrong diaspora.5 In July of 2014, the idea of starting a com- munity blog was entertained as a way to formalize and preserve discourse; by July 12, the site had been regis- tered by Sam Burnstein and named Carcinisation—the process by which organisms convergently evolve crab-like characteristics6—after a group shibboleth. Butrnstein recruited and hustled for submissions; The Sublemon, St. Rev, Matt Simpson, and Perry were joined by a more rationalist-minded, pseudony- mous coalition including Simplicio and Aethercircuit. Perry’s essays during this time—summer and fall of 2014—draw heavily on their sources; they are less 4 “Ritual Epistemology,” page 173. 5 Rationalism here is meant less in the Cartesian sense, as an opposition to empiricism, and more as the worldview domestic to the blog LessWrong, which was founded in the 2000s by Eliezer Yudkowsky. 6 See “Toward a Synthesis of Flourishy Forms,” page 97. 9