Son of Bride of White Nationalist Meeting

[previously in a series: Part 1, Part 2]

When we look back on WWII, we think in terms of ‘this is the beginning, this is the middle, and this is the end.’ Those who lived through it had only vague, uncertain ideas about where they were in the war. Even as late as 1945, it was widely thought that Japan would not surrender until 1946 or 1947.

If AGI comes in 2026, people will look back on 2024 as two years before the most important year in human history. For those of us who lived through 2024, it was simply 2024. We thought AGI could arrive tomorrow, in 2030, or (from our mortal points of view) never. Were LLMs just uncreative next-token-predictors, unable to reach beyond the intellectual level of their training data, as Robin Hanson believed? I didn’t think so. After all, human language learning is just mimicry; it doesn’t mean humans don’t have novel thoughts.

Most people in 2024 didn’t think much about AGI. For those of us who did, the knowledge of its impending arrival changed little in our lives. It made us feel superior to the masses, but it’s not like we were participating in the greatest project in human history. You worked in an AI lab or you were a bystander. For me, May 2024 meant attending a meeting of the Robinson Crusoe Society, where we were discussing soon-to-be-irrelevant political issues.

The man speaking to an audience of about twenty-five people was Andrew Jones, a leader of the vantardist Northwest Territorial Organization. He was forty-four, older than most of his audience, and had short black hair and a short black beard. He was slightly overweight and was dressed in a dark green uniform with a blue-white-green tricolor flag patch. Having researched his background before the meeting, it seemed he was a bridge between WN 1.0 and WN 2.0. He hadn’t been to college and gave off a working-class air, but he was also a self-taught computer programmer.

Andrew was giving a bombastic speech about the need for whites to form a separatist white ethnostate in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana. He touched on the ‘dead end’ of Trumpism, the “open” southern border and the generational divide among Republican politicians between populists and old-school conservatives. His vision was possible, he said, because the non-white coalition was inherently fractious, as could be seen in the conflict over Palestine, and because the “spiritual corruption” of the ZOG made its followers weak.

As I glanced around the room, it occurred to me that the demographics closely mirrored that of the Astral Codex Ten reader survey and the rationalist groups I had attended. Mostly white, mostly male, with about as many non-white men as women, and a heavy representation of computer programmers. The demographics didn’t match perfectly; I had never met any trans people at the RCS meetings. In both white nationalism and rationalism, people noticed the peculiar demographic pattern and argued about the cause. Whatever is causing the pattern in one is likely also causing the same pattern in the other. Any explanation should try to explain both.

After Andrew stopped speaking, about a third of people clapped. “I’m sure the non-clappers have a lot to say in response to my speech,” he said with a grin. He knew how many of us were critics of white nationalism or disaffected former white nationalists.

“I do,” said Blake Jonhston. Blake was a clean-shaven thirty-one-year-old man with short brown hair and glasses. He worked as a lawyer, which theoretically meant he was skilled at arguing in front of an audience, though he had told me his job was mostly just writing papers.

Jones moved away from his central position to make room for Blake. “Take it away,” he said.

“In your speech, you said that, under our Judaized culture, people can no longer understand patriotism. Their only loyalty is to money. The U.S. flag doesn’t mean anything anymore; it should be taken down and replaced with the hundred-dollar bill. I am not sure that a world where money matters more and flags matter less is a bad thing. Let’s compare and contrast such objects. Both have little intrinsic value; they have value because we believe they have value. Both are promissory notes. The trader or employer promises that in return for your goods or labor, you will get this piece of paper that can buy other goods or labor later on. The political leader promises that in return for paying taxes or volunteering to fight, a series of political promises will be fulfilled.”

“In both cases, the promise can wind up unfulfilled. Recall the woman in the Weimar Republic who left a basket of money in her backyard. Later, she discovered that a thief had stolen the basket; he left the money behind. Politicos can fail to deliver their promises. Sometimes, it’s because they lost a war; see the examples of the Confederacy, South Vietnam, or Tamil Eelam. They could win but still fail to deliver on most of their promises; see the proletarian paradise of the USSR. They could deliver on half of their promises, like the third-world anti-colonial movements, who promised to drive out the colonizers and replace them with governments that were not ravenous kleptocracies.”

“Both the flag and the bill can fail to deliver their promises, but the flag can fail in a way the bill cannot. If you sacrifice for money you thought would buy you twelve eggs, you may find that it actually buys six eggs or no eggs at all. But it won’t leave you with negative eggs. It won’t leave you with the opposite of the thing you thought you were getting. You could join the army, fight for a flag that represents one set of values and promises, only to find that because of an election or coup in the capital, you are now fighting for a radically different set of values and promises. Look at the American soldiers who volunteered thinking they would fight in Afghanistan only to be sent to Iraq instead. Look at how the U.S. military went from forbidding open homosexuality to celebrating it as a positive good. The average soldier must toe the new party line. You don’t want a bad conduct discharge now, do you? You may say this is a peculiarly American disease, but these same factionalist struggles will be present in any movement. Look at the never-ending infighting over Christianity among white nationalists.”

“Money, outside authoritarian regimes, is fungible and tradeable. You can hedge your bets by holding many different currencies. You cannot easily acquire multiple citizenships, particularly if you’re a soldier who takes flags oh-so-seriously. This incentivizes political leaders to make unrealistic promises. To make emotionally laden appeals to often immature young recruits to Believe, Believe, Believe, in a context where social pressure silences the skeptics. The young recruit cannot go to a finance website and see a crowdsourced estimate made by dispassionate foreigners of how likely these promises are to be fulfilled. He cannot buy into another flag in case his loses value.”

“You can see this disparity in the behavior of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They sent their mimetic communist parties their hammer-and-sickle flag, with all the promises that went along with that. But they didn’t export rubles. It was much easier to get some communist in Mexico, India, or Brazil to believe in the Soviet flag than it was to get him to believe in the value of the Soviet ruble. Those guys held dollars, pounds, or Swiss Francs instead. There’s a lesson here for those who would be taken in by these multipolar world grifters. Do they hold their money in Russian or Chinese banks? Or do they rely on America and Europe, as bad as those places admittedly are?”

Andrew looked taken aback, like he was facing a counterargument he had failed to anticipate. He began speaking. “You compared and contrasted money and flags as if they are opposed, as if you must choose one or another. That was not the point I was trying to make. Money, of course, has its value as a medium of exchange and will still exist in the free Northwest Republic. I was not taking issue with the existence of money, nor with people valuing money, but with people putting exclusive value on money. Money can buy food, housing, and healthcare; those are important things. But there are a lot of things money cannot buy. It cannot buy love, community, or loyalty. Most importantly, it cannot secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

“Money cannot buy community?” Blake asked. “I don’t agree. Consider what it would look like if we had a true free market in housing. Developers in Texas and Arizona would build HOA communities that were white-only. There’d be more demand for this, too, since affluent white libtards would have to deal with twenty poor people renting the neighboring house. Whenever people want something, money gives someone an incentive to deliver it.”

“You libertarians always say, if we had a free market, such-and-such wouldn’t be a problem. Well, how do you get a free market?”

“I’m not libertarian. I don’t share the neurotic obsession with cutting rich people’s taxes,” Blake said.

“Libertarian, pro-market, whatever. Anyway, how do you get your free market? You need a political movement, a flag, and then you’re back to relying on more primal urges. As I said, money cannot buy loyalty. It can’t buy you people who can’t be bought. Y’all know who Julia Butterfly Hill is?”

There were blank stares throughout the room. “Never heard of her,” some said.

“She’s a race traitor, environmental activist, and NIMBY who occupies other people’s property. She better represents the Nietzschean will to power than every Greek statue account on Twitter. Yeah, part of that is anarcho-tyranny, the government protecting her from her victims. But it’s also because she’s part of a milieu that glorifies political activism. Whereas conservatives and libertarians hear a message that valorizes individualism, accomplishment, money, and business while describing politics as dirty and politicians as corrupt. No wonder then that so many withdraw into the glorious private for-profit sector and then complain that their side keeps losing.”

“The environmentalists have a lot of activist energy,” Blake said. “But it’s that very same thing that leads them to constantly sabotage their own goals. Look at all the environmental lawsuits against renewable energy development. The problem with these emotion-laden movements is that they lose sight of their original goals. The means become an end. The same thing has happened among white nationalists. There is this demand for a 100% pure white ethnostate, something not considered necessary in the Jim Crow South but which whites now apparently cannot survive without. A radical demand that alienates people and ends up sabotaging the movement’s goals.”

“Okay, well how would you do the movement differently?” Andrew asked.

“Well, I should note here that I have an Asian wife, though at this point an Asian wife is basically a requirement for participation in the white nationalist movement.”

There was snickering throughout the room at that line.

Blake continued. “Here would be my platform: harsh punishments for criminals, abolition of anti-discrimination law, an end to NIMBY restrictions on housing development, elimination of higher education subsidies, and the defunding of the nonprofit-industrial complex. These are all primary demands. We’re saying, ‘we want X,’ not ‘we want exclusive political power over a territory in order to get X.’ The latter necessarily steps on other people’s toes far more, as it sets up an inherently zero-sum political game. My proposal also doesn’t run the risk that ‘patriotism’ to the Northwest state winds up becoming more important than the political demands themselves.”

“Good luck implementing that platform in a democratic, majority non-white country. It’s white separatism or white supremacy.”

“Your ethnostate would only be possible, I’m sure you’d agree, if you convince a critical mass of whites, say, at least 15% of the population, to go along with it?”

“Yes, I agree.”

“Well, I think that 15% of the population would have a better chance at working within the existing democratic system than through separatism. Parts of my suggestion are already achievable today. Many higher ed subsidies come from the states; criminal law is mostly state and local. Abolition of anti-discrimination law would be most difficult, but even then, you could chip away at it by getting hostile judges on the bench.”

“Even if you could achieve it, it would be at the mercy of a brown country’s political system. Those don’t tend to be very stable. That isn’t the future for white children that I want.”

“You may like your idea better, but mine is more realistic.”

“Perhaps we’ll have to agree to disagree on that,” Andrew said. He looked slightly frustrated, like he suspected that he had lost the debate.

“Let’s talk more about this free market housing stuff,” I said. I turned to Blake. “If your ideas were implemented, I doubt that anyone would buy into a white-only HOA community. Even the few who would want to would fear retaliatory boycotts.”

“Maybe and maybe not,” Blake responded. “Here’s what I see happening. We know people care a great deal about who their neighbors are. It stands to reason that, as with everything, there should be firms that exist to make money by fulfilling this desire. To buy into a community, you’d go before a committee of current residents, who can vote yay or nay for any reason they like. This would be used for many different things. Libs would use it to exclude ‘racists,’ of course.”

“It’d be like Tinder. Swipe left or swipe right.”

“Exactly,” Blake said. “In dating, we accept that we may be rejected for ‘arbitrary,’ ‘irrational,’ ‘discriminatory’ reasons. In this world, that would just be part of life.”

“It is true people care a great deal about who their neighbors are,” I said. “On the other hand, you’d expect this to exist already. Yes, in America it would run afoul of anti-discrimination law, but why doesn’t it exist in South Korea or Japan, which were until recently highly homogenous? The closest thing I can think of are the admissions committees in Israel, which only apply to like 1% of the country. Something else is going on with high housing values, something we don’t quite understand.”

“Maybe the thing they really care about is being next to other people with money?” said Joel Smith.

“Perhaps,” I said. “But rich people will tell you there’s a big difference between money and class. Maybe that’s just something they say to make their idea of class seem less mercenary. Even then, you’d expect that there would be communities where to live there you have to prove you are rich but don’t need to actually part with your money. Anyway, Blake, with regards to the housing thing, I just don’t see a way to get from here to there. People are accustomed to a world where every property is accessible if you have enough money and won’t stand for changing that.”

“I’ve thought about this. I imagine it would be easier for people to swallow in an ultradense city, where it doesn’t matter if a community of two thousand excludes you because there are millions very close by. By ultradense, I don’t mean Manhattan, I mean far denser than that. Most of Manhattan is not skyscrapers, but it could be. Imagine those skyscrapers expanding until they touch so that roads turn into tunnels.”

“An arcology?”

“Yes,” Blake said. “Though I don’t like that word, as it has connotations of eco homosexuality and out-there social engineering experiments. This is just a city, but denser and with freedom of association.”

“People living in this city would almost never see the sun,” Andrew said.

“There’d still be the top level. But yes, people would be deprived of natural light. Imagine the upsides. The very best restaurants in the world, many, many job opportunities, and most importantly, people. We all have ‘friends’ in other states, who are there mostly because job opportunities and housing costs forced us to spread out. Imagine if there were 100 million people in a single city. All your friends and family a subway ride away. This would make it much easier to form mini-tribes. You could have a tower full of white nationalists next to a tower full of Hasidic Jews next to a tower of polyamorists, rarely needing to interact or think about one another. Plus, such density would be conducive to mass surveillance, which would help solve some of the problems caused by the presence of violence-prone groups.”

“Didn’t they try that with the Kowloon Walled City?” Andrew asked.

“Yes, and it succeeded, too. None of the critics of the Kowloon Walled City have ever explained why, if it was so bad, so many people voluntarily lived there.”

“I’m not an expert on East Asia, so I wouldn’t know,” Andrew said.

I thought then that Blake had stolen the show. Andrew’s ideology was just a rehash of twentieth-century ethnonationalism. It wasn’t “Nazism” so much as Czech or Slovene nationalism, an awakening of a nation that didn’t think of itself as a nation. Blake’s was novel. I reminded myself that new ideas were not necessarily the ideas of the future.

“It’s funny,” Andrew said. “You attacked what I thought was the strongest part of my argument. The ZOG, in attacking me, will not run to the defense of the cult of the Almighty dollar. Instead, they will cite American patriotism, call white nationalism anti-Christian, etc. Why is that? Because people know that a love of money is inconsistent with loyalty. They can see that a politician who loves money above all will be dancing to the tune of whoever throws the most money his way.”

“I have a different explanation,” Blake said. “We evolved in a zero-sum world of wars between small tribes. Patriotism hijacks those circuits in our minds that make us loyal to our tribes. I say hijack because, unlike in our ancestral tribes, co-nationals are not our literal genetic cousins. Our primordial minds think of the patriot as someone who fights for the tribe. Money reminds our primordial minds of the person who wants to advance at the expense of others within the tribe. We are not adapted to a positive-sum world of economic growth. Today, we see a slow genetic adaptation. Those who are fighting for their nations in Ukraine or Russia are being removed from the gene pool. While those who fled Russia at the beginning of the war are being welcomed back. Putin might wish he could shoot them, but he needs their skills and money.”

“It reminds me of the quote by George Orwell,” I said. “Whereas socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”

“Orwell didn’t know what he was talking about,” scoffed Ishwar Bharadwaj. “Germans voted for Hitler in response to the Great Depression, when he proclaimed his desire for peace. When the economy was good, he got very little support.”

“But does the principle work in general?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Ishwar said. “The idea that money is profane might be one reason democratic socialism failed. When was the last time socialists promised you a good time? The things they promise are usually for someone else: the working class, the poor, the “sexual minorities,” even the deer and fish. They always act like they’re talking to the privileged children of the wealthy, lecturing them to stop being so greedy and selfish, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as workers realize they are not the target audience.”

“Getting back to the issue at hand,” Andrew said, “There may be genetic selection against patriotism, just as there is genetic selection against intelligence. While this may make low-IQ, unpatriotic people the ‘fittest’ in Darwinian terms, they certainly aren’t superior. You ignored my point about how politicians who value money above everything will be corrupted. Why do you think the Republican party has been captured by corporate interests?”

“You might call it the revealed preference of Republican primary voters,” Blake said. “We’re fond of pointing out the revealed preference of affluent white libtards for lily-white neighborhoods, but doesn’t the same thing apply to white Republican primary voters in Iowa, who voted out Steve King? My thinking about this has evolved. I used to think Republican legislators were ideologically committed to neoconservatism or were ‘out-of-touch’ as a result of living in blue urban areas. I still think that’s part of it, but I also consider that many of them may have looked at it rationally and concluded that adopting more populist positions will not be rewarded by Republican voters and will cost them money with the donor class.”

“I agree,” Ishwar said. “I’ve observed that various groups, white nationalists, far-Left radicals, and Sohrab Ahmari, all proclaim, correctly, that the white-Jewish ruling elite looks down its nose at the white working class. They don’t all use those terms, but that’s what they’re saying. They say they stand for empowering the white working class. But the empowerment they propose is always what they think is in the white workingman’s best interest, instead of what the white workingman actually wants. The real empowerment is Donald Trump. Perhaps the ultimate form of respect for someone is giving them what they want. Trump voters don’t want socialism, they don’t want racial nationalism, they just really like Donald Trump and don’t much care for policy.”

“That sounds like a cope from people who’ve failed to sway the working class to their side,” Andrew said. “These nerds – I mean no disrespect, I’m a nerd too – they know they lack the requisite social skills to win an election. Like the spurned romantic, they respond by angrily rejecting the people they know will reject them.”

“Do you disagree that these Trump fans don’t care much for policy?” Ishwar asked.

“No. But that is hardly a new phenomenon. Look at Obama and all the promises he made to close down Guantanamo Bay, end warrantless surveillance, etcetera, etcetera. His supporters were completely nonplussed at his failure to do those things. People vote for Trump because they think he’s someone who doesn’t look down on them the way most other politicians do. I disagree, I see him as basically a crook who cares about nobody but himself, but I can relate to it and understand it. The people will always be disinterested in policy. One reason is that they’re busy working and having children, while intellectuals are disproportionately childless. They judge politicians on the basis of personality and vibes, whether this person cares about me and will pursue my interests.”

I was skeptical, wondering if Andrew had convinced himself of what he knew deep down was an unrealistic, sentimental view of ordinary whites. He didn’t want to think of he was fighting for a nation of overweight people who sat around the TV.

“Anyway,” Andrew continued, “the corruptibility of a movement depends on the quality of its leaders, not its average people. Blake here admitted that Republican politicians only care about getting elected. Why is that? There’s an old saying that a white nationalist wants to save his race, while a conservative only wants to save his money. An ideology oriented around money will have leaders who sell out. Many Republican politicos sell out their alleged libertarianism, making special regulations to favor their special interests. Look, for instance, at certificate-of-need laws.”

“Politicians are sellouts, okay, fine. What are we supposed to do with that information? A lot of the Right is oriented around shaming people to be better, calling them cucks, wimps, and traitors. You hear the complaint that men of our generation are weak, unmanly, unlike the guys who landed on Normandy. But if the Greatest Generation was so patriotic, so manly, why’d they need the draft? Only 40% of soldiers were volunteers. Changing people’s nature is very difficult. A political movement ought to focus on changing their incentives and leave changing human nature to the eugenicists. It doesn’t seem to me that nationalist politicians are any less corruptible than classical liberal ones. After all, you spent much of your speech condemning all the freaks in the white nationalist movement.”

“I did, and the solution to that is better vetting of members and less tolerance for ‘eccentrics.’ As to your ideology, if it is so much more likely to be successful than mine, why are you not out doing anything? I wear my uniform and speak in the streets. I’m sure to a lot of you that’s ‘clownish’ behavior. But what are you doing? There are all these forums where smart people make up ideas to impress other smart people, ideas that stay on the internet and never enter the real world.”

“Au contraire. The internet is the real world. The political, media, and business elites of the future are reading blogs and forums today. Where do you think Elon Musk got the idea that Democrats support immigration because they want to bring in future democratic voters? We’ve truly melted that man’s mind. As to ‘doing something,’ I may well run for state legislature in the future. Other things are occurring behind the scenes. Sometimes, when it looks like people are just talking and not doing it’s because the things they’re doing are not public yet.”

I thought Blake’s claim about maybe possibly running for state legislature was bull. Most people who make claims like that never act on them.

“Does your ideology even have a name?” Andrew asked.

“I call it Prometheanism,” Blake said. “Yes, that word already means something else, but it won’t take much to steal it, just need a few news stories about how Prometheanism means something ‘racist.’”

“It reminds me of Mark Brahmin and his Apollonianism crap. In all these years, I’ve never bothered to look up exactly what Apollonian and Dionysian mean,” Andrew said, chuckling.

“Yes, the whole Apollonian thing is rather pretentious. Prometheanism isn’t yammering on about ancient Greek philosophy. Prometheanism addresses the problems of the 21^st century. You won’t find these problems, or their solutions, in the Bible or ancient philosophy texts. Instead of name-dropping prestigious ancients, you must figure out the solutions yourself.”

“And what are these problems?”

“The problems are simple: there are not enough people and many are distributed in low-productivity regions, a legacy from when most labor was concentrated in agriculture or industry that is outdated in our mainly service-sector economy. The low-fertility thing will be a tough nut to crack. But the distribution-of-population thing is largely the result of a few laws that can be changed.”

“What would be the slogan?” Andrew asked. “Arcology now!”

“Perhaps.”

“How does this differ from your bog-standard open-borders libertarianism?”

 “There is a difference in emphasis. Libertarians, at least before the rise of the alt-Right, had a schizophrenic attitude toward people. There was the misanthropic gun collector who lived on his ranch in Montana. And then there was the cosmotarian who proclaimed that everyone is basically good; we just misunderstand one another because of ‘prejudice.’ Anything in the middle was ‘bigotry.’ The liberal celebrates diversity and then celebrates the process of integration and intermarriage that will ultimately destroy it. The cosmotarian is what the libertarian is often accused of being, a man who sees humans only as producers and consumers and denies the importance of culture, identity, and community. Both embrace urbanization as a solvent of human differences. In both cases, personal behavior is often at odds with the ideology; they know which part of the big city they want to live in. Prometheanism embraces human differences and the freedom to live them out.”

“Maybe the liberals and cosmotarians are right, factually, that urbanization is the solvent of decomposition?” I asked. “Maybe it’s true that people are indeed mostly economic animals? If you ask people, they’ll tell you that of course culture, identity, community matters more than money. But their behavior shows where their real priority lies. They want a big house, a nice car, and 500 channels of cable TV or however it is normies pay for TV now.”

“Residential segregation patterns show they care about more than just money,” Andrew said.

“Yes, that is true,” I said. “White nationalists saw whites fleeing integration, not just ‘racists’ but staunch liberals too. They concluded from that racial feeling, ‘racism’ if you will, was a natural, biological inevitability, that it could not be repressed even by people ideologically committed to doing so. I think they drew the wrong conclusion. The guy who moved to the suburbs didn’t like his kids getting beaten up in school. That didn’t necessarily mean he had or wanted a ‘racial identity,’ that he put an inherent value on racial homogeneity, or that he gave two s**** about his fellow white people. When a bunch of middle-class Asians moved next to him, it turned out that racial diversity wasn’t so bad after all.”

“There’s a hazard in misusing the concept of revealed preference,” Blake said. “You can’t say, ‘men say they like thin women, but look how many marry fat women, revealed preference dude!’ Nor can you say, ‘people choose X over Y where Y is something the government made illegal, therefore there is a revealed preference for X.’ Remember here that my proposal would allow for not just racial sorting. People could sort on class, political opinions, religions, hobbies and interests. There will be a lot of people who would screech in horror at the idea of living in an all-white building, but would be fine living in a community that restricted its residents to vegans or those with postgraduate degrees.”

“Anti-discrimination laws do not prohibit everything,” I said. “You can’t have an all-Catholic neighborhood, but there’s nothing stopping a Catholic in Missouri from moving to Pensylvania because Pensylvania has more Catholics. For the most part, Catholics, even mass-every-Sunday types, are fine living around lots of Protestants. When people move, it’s largely motivated by economic and quality-of-life factors. There are a few groups who try to build intentional communities in spite of the legal hurdles, like the Haredim. These are the groups who would buy special sectors in your arcology. For the rest, it will just be ‘keep me away from the poor, particularly poor blacks, and otherwise I don’t care.’ I don’t foresee any special communities of libertarians or D&D players. Those communities would both be gender-imbalanced and people would not want to pigeonhole themselves with something they may lose interest in in five years. I suspect that much of what people want when they buy into a rich neighborhood is the status of living in a rich neighborhood. They don’t necessarily see an inherent value in their neighbors being rich. The way I see it, people just want to be left alone by their neighbors. The bottom quintile are bad at that, so people want to live away from them. But once you get above that ‘floor,’ nobody cares that much.”

“Are you to tell me that the rich send their kids to private schools with other rich kids for the ‘status’ of being able to drop 40 grand a year? I’m pretty sure such schools exist even in areas where public school kids are overwhelmingly from middle-class white families.”

I was taken aback. “Okay, you’ve got me there,” I said. “I think schooling and housing are different animals. The student is sitting next to twenty other kids, told to do group projects with those kids. With housing, you just share walls.”

“You could share more than that,” Blake said. “There’d be common areas, playgrounds, places like this,” he said, looking up and around.

The meeting was taking place in a clubhouse in a suburban HOA-based community. Almost all of the attendees lived elsewhere in the area, so it wasn’t serving such a communal function. But that should be expected; this was a normal, money-buys-you-in HOA made up of people with little in common.

“Do people care more for money than culture or identity? Probably. If they only care one-tenth as much about the latter as the former, that’s still enough to impact behavior. Remember, this would be easier than ever in an ultradense city. In the past, where you lived was determined by where you worked. You lived on the farm because you worked on the farm. You lived near the mine because that’s where the coal was. You lived near the factory because that’s where the millionaire businessmen decided to put the factory. In an ultradense city, there may be so many options for housing close to your place of work that who your neighbors are, even if it’s something you don’t care that much about, becomes the natural tiebreaker. If you tell people right now, ‘I want to live around only rationalists’ or ‘I want to live around only D&D players, that’s ‘weird,’ marks you off as anti-social, someone who can’t cut it in mainstream society and wants an ‘out.’ In my notional world, it is just normal. We all went to high school. We know how cliquey humans naturally are.”

“High school never ends in the arcology,” Joel said jokingly.

“High school cliquey-ness, but without the thing where you were forced to sit in the same room with all those people you didn’t like for hours on end.”

“I was going to say we’ll never know what would happen in your notional world,” I said. “We may get the arcology, but it will be in a post-human world, not our world of humans working in the service sector. But then I thought that AI might be able to tell us, based on pure deductive reasoning, which one of us is right.”

“Hmm,” Blake said. “You have a more optimistic view of pure deduction than I do. A big part of progress was de-emphasizing deduction in favor of experimentation.”

“That was deduction by a species of talking monkeys,” I said. “It doesn’t apply to the deductions of a far smarter AGI.”

“Perhaps the AGI could conduct an experiment, a simulation of walking, talking, breathing people,” Ishwar said. “Perhaps that’s what we are, characters in a simulation designed to test some obscure political ideology.”

“Wouldn’t the ‘people’ there be philosophical zombies?” Joel asked.

Oh no, I thought. Not the p-zombie nonsense again.