Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
No one will remember them. That’s what they can’t stand. One day they will die, and one day not long after that they will be forgotten. The fear is all-encompassing. It guides everything they do. The fear is why they plaster their names everywhere. The fear is why they insist upon inserting themselves into everything we say and do. The fear is why they won’t — not for one single, solitary moment — shut the fuck up. To be silenced is to be dead already. They can’t have that.
They want to be remembered alongside the great conquerors. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Elon Musk. Rolls off the tongue. But they don’t understand that those men, too, will be forgotten. They have died and their accomplishments have receded. All that’s left is for historical memory to decompose like the fallen leaves. This, too, will happen sooner than they wish, and inevitably.
We are living in a new dark age. Not qualitatively dark, not in terms of our barbarism and indifference to suffering — although our age is dark in that way, too — but quantitatively dark. Our era will be invisible to future historians, should any exist. It will be as though it never happened.
All that we know about our past is due to the unlikely survival of precious few artifacts and relics. Cavemen fortuitously perishing amid the glaciers (fortuitous for us, not for them). Shards of pottery, fragments of stone tablets, faded works of art that have survived not by design but due to accidents of geography and climate. Where written works have survived, understand that the geological time separating their creation and their discovery is infinitesimal. Most of it is already gone.
What artifacts are today’s conquerors leaving behind? We aren’t creating scrolls or murals or sculptures to contain our civilization’s collected wisdom. We’re encoding them in ones and zeroes. There’s a chance, however slight, that a far-distance descendant finding a cuneiform tablet will somehow be able to translate it. No such chance exists for the future archaeologist who happens upon a solid-state drive. Whatever they theorize about its purpose and value will certainly be wrong.
What of our tributes and paeans to the colossi who stand astride our civilization today with weird postures and anatomically improbable proportions? They exist, sadly, but mostly in the form of tweets and blog posts. People like to say that once something is on the internet, it’s there forever. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once something is on the internet, it no longer exists in any meaningful form. Try to find my Sega Saturn reviews from 1996 and then tell me that they’ve been immortalized. I can live with their loss. But now imagine that my Sega Saturn reviews from 1996 have granted me world-historical wealth and power, and you might understand why it’s not so easy for some people to let these things go.
As Hans Gruber reminded us, “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” Hence why our self-styled great men of history keep trying to invent new worlds. If you can’t conquer Earth, conquer Mars. If you can’t bend reality to your will, bend virtual reality. If you can’t convince real people that you’re funny and cool, create artificial people who will think so (it will really boost your follower count). Lucifer preferred reigning in Hell to serving in Heaven; our demons prefer reigning over a simulacrum to even existing in reality. As reality decays across the desert of the real, they cling ever more tightly to the scraps.
It will all be gone. Their metaverses and their artificial intelligences and their manifestoes and, above all, their names. Maybe humankind will live on for thousands of years more. Maybe we won’t. Maybe the chaotic systems they are building and forcing us to live within will doom us, and maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll colonize Mars. (They won’t colonize Mars.)
The only thing I know for sure is that, one day, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel will be equally as dead as you and I. Even Donald Trump will finally, mercifully, be forgotten, whether or not anyone remains who could possibly remember. The universe tends toward entropy and through their actions they are hastening, not arresting, the trend.
The worst part, for them, is that they know it. As surely as Prince Mishkin, they are aware with each thudding, inexorable step that they are approaching the cosmic gallows. Unlike Dostoevsky’s tragic hero, no reprieve will be granted. For centuries they may be remembered as historical figures who presided over a deranged and manic era; for millennia as figures of myth, equal parts tragic and wrathful; and then they will be gone. Oblivion awaits. This knowledge tears them up.
So every time you’re forced to behold their dopey faces and stupid haircuts, listen to their halting, nonsensical words, and to run ever more of your own precious and fleeting existence through the infernal devices they’ve created which extract your vitality like the miracle juicing machines of late-night infomercials, know this: they are terrified. They are miserable. They are smaller and weaker than you could ever be.
And one day they will be gone.
