BOTTOMLESS WHEATGRASS MARGARITAS (and other apparatuses of deceit)
by FIONA PEARL MILLER
Bottomless wheatgrass margaritas were served at the funeral of Joan Didion’s best friend the weekend after Luigi Mangione was found a wanted man, the first December weekend of this winter that New York City temperatures hit below freezing and the last weekend before the holidays would leave certain parts of this transplant town half-empty.
Luigi—and he is being referred to by this mononym—was apprehended at a McDonald’s in small-town Pennsylvania eating a hash brown after a five day manhunt following the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
It is unclear, friends of mine are saying, why the shooter would evade capture, get out of New York, only to sit and wait less than three hundred miles away from Central Park. It is unclear why he would keep his 3D-printed gun and silencer on his person, alongside the fake ID he used at his hostel, alongside his manifesto. How he knew Brian Thompson’s schedule the day of the murder is unclear. The exact method used to find him is also unclear; first it was reported he was found based off of a tip from a McDonald’s employee, then a customer. Some people I know think that the tip was actually given out by the McDonald’s self-service kiosk facial recognition technology, that the “employee” in question is written in binary code, that this is not being reported because perhaps the FBI contracts with McDonald’s and in extraordinary circumstances such as a good old fashioned manhunt every drive-thru might as well be a police station. Imagine that.
I can tell you that there are self-service kiosks in the McDonald’s where they found him. I can also tell you that the employees there had to take off their nametags by the time we rolled in, a week before Christmas at four pm when it was pale-mist raining and already dark out. In the corner of the Altoona McDonald’s that afternoon there was a cop, and a private security guard, and they were sitting with a few other men in plain clothes who didn’t seem to like the looks of me and my crew. We weren’t doing anything too imposing, just ordering Chicken Nuggets and Big Macs, Diet Cokes and Milkshakes and looking around getting a sense of the place. We thought we were in plain clothes too. One thing we noticed about the people there was that they could tell from a cursory glance we weren’t from around those parts.
When we asked the men in the corner if there were any concerns about vigilante retaliation against the Altoona McDonald’s—which sits at the intersection of Emerson and Plank St.—they said no comment. We respected that and finished our fries and said Have a Nice Day. When we drove away we all agreed it was fitting for Luigi to have been found at a McDonald’s. It was just so exactly American.
Something I was hearing a lot of in the weeks that followed: There’s something fishy about all this. This has become a common sentiment, that things are not quite how they seem. It is the pervasive nagging feeling of a body politic living in a state of unreality, where the distinction between fact and fable is blurred to the point of obliteration and the veil is so thick and authority so compromised: to be well-informed in the year 2025 is to experience a constant cognitive dissonance that follows you around like a shadow a half beat behind the pace of your footsteps. A clutter inside your mind. There are too many lies to keep track of, too many renditions of “what is” that directly conflict, that overlap, that fluctuate.
“The center is not holding.” “The world is wobbling.” Two lines repeating in the back of my mind during the early months of 2025—the former a Didion repurposing of Yeats, used in the first line of Slouching Towards Bethlehem to describe the “state of things” in the United States of America in the year 1967; the latter an appropriation of Hannah Arendt, a line a former college professor of mine used to describe Arendt’s understanding of what would happen in that moment when lies became the norm, when truth ceased to be the sky above us and the ground below: the rug gets pulled out from underneath, “The World Wobbles!”
The edges are blurring: On the first day of the New Year 2025 an army veteran drove his car straight into Bourbon Street, killing 14 people in what was evidently an ISIS venture. That same day, a different army veteran shot himself in the head and blew up his cybertruck outside of Trump Hotel in Vegas. The two events, so far, are still to be connected, meaning they are unconnected; two misfiring synapses in the collective unconscious. It makes sense, to me, that these first displays of discord bubbling over the surface are localized in Vegas and on Bourbon Street, portals of chaos in this country. In my notebook on January First I wrote that next would be Miami Beach, or Hollywood Boulevard.
Much has been made of the “Luigi Mangione Fervor.” Think pieces and talking heads attempt to make sense of the ardor which furnished his legal fund, which fueled those masses turning out to stand outside his court appearances brightly proselytizing the potential of jury nullification—I went to one of these such gatherings, and spoke to the people there. This zeal has little to do with his physical appearance, though admittedly it certainly doesn’t hinder his appeal. It is catharsis: the reaction of a repressed body politic who, having acquiesced itself to passivity amid a society which appears at face value to be fixed,—is confronted with tangible evidence that human action does, in fact, still contain some power after all.
We are in an important historical moment. This triumph of brute feeling, this rejection of neoliberal codes of order, of comfort, of smoothness of relations and oh well and the distillation of man into an obedient bot, is occurring in the same strained breath of history as our technological overlords out west in Silicon Valley—embroiled in what is clearly developing into an international arms race towards Artificial General Intelligence—consider what it really means to be human anyway. And amidst this consideration, technological interference in the human experience has never been so complete: we live, in the year 2025, almost completely within (or at least, within reach of) the confines of the digital universe. One needs only to look around any crowded train car or peer into any restaurant window come brunchtime to witness the power of The Algorithm. Of course, there is not one algorithm to blame for the pervasive mental flattening, the mass-homogenization of the body politic, but stay with me here now—the word “algorithm” has a simple etymological origin, likely stemming from French or Latin or Arabic and either way meaning some form of numerical system of computation. But, for the fun of it, we could take it apart by sound: algo-rhythm, and then we could remember that the prefix “algo-” means pain, that the word “rhythm” means flow, and if we did all that we might come to find that the ubiquitous signifier has a parallel, mirrored meaning. Pain-flow, a phrase that encapsulates quite aptly the algorithm’s function of harnessing and channeling emotions, directing the natural feeling of the individual towards its proper outlet. This bureaucratically arranged cathexis standardizes a psychological process that had heretofore been a personal, autonomous experience,—and does this so shrewdly that the individual rarely takes notice.
We are, in 2025, outsourcing more and more of our natural urges, directing them towards prescribed channels deemed suitable. We who have split ourselves in two since we came of age, we who have willingly distilled ourselves into the digital where nothing lives: as we spend more and more time online there is no outlet for the feeling moment which is why we all have anxiety and depression and adhd and borderline personality disorder bipolar disorder autism the list goes on and on and on and the real thing that’s happening is there is no outlet for these feelings these goddamn emotions piling up in us with nowhere to go because we—as fully developed technicized humans—meet each feeling with a rational thought: i am feeling this way because my father left me because my mother worked too much because i am a narcissist and i take things too personally but really my friend owes me nothing at all—and thus through our own masturbatory cerebral intelligence we neutralize the feeling. We are above the feeling we are above our “reptile brain” “monkey brain” we are above our “hormones” and we do away with all that as we would a used up paper napkin, as we would a barely touched to-go container of salsa.
The veil is lifting: In the Capitol Rotunda at Trump’s inauguration were, behind his family but closer to him than his cabinet picks, four out of five of the world’s richest men: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. This proud allegiance marks a stark symbolic departure from the quasi-Jacksonian populist ambitions of President Trump’s first term—Jackson, remember, on his inauguration day opened the doors of the White House to the people. Beyond the obvious implications of this alignment, the unabashed message that money can and does buy political power, a message which is as sufficiently covered by a cursory scroll through Bernie Sanders’s Instagram reel page as it is by a walk down the street, it is important to note that all four of these men are heavily invested in the development of AI.
Nietzsche understood truth to be a fable, a foundational lie governing society—but a necessary one because it functions as a peace treaty without which individuals could not interact with one another. Without a common conception of “what is,” we have no shared ground on which to relate. The democrats and the republicans alike have crafted versions of truth that, when adopted, allow their disciples to relate with one another but prevent them from meeting with anyone else on the same ground because they can not agree on what the facts even are. This prevents not only the possibility of a real form of politics, since those that make up the polis are unable to engage in discourse with one another, but also the ability for individuals to form their own opinions: In her last public interview, Hannah Arendt stated that “if everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer…And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." Human action is predicated on the ability to judge for oneself, an ability that is effectively disabled by the inability to know what is and isn’t true.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical (for now) AI system that would match or surpass the cognitive abilities of the human mind. Belief in the potential for AGI to exist, for any machine to mimic the mechanisms of human cognition—rests upon a few preconditional assumptions. The first: that “reason” is a subjective cognitive ability possessed in some capacity by every individual; that its function is purely instrumental, conforming given ends to the most logical means. This understanding of what it means to be “reasonable” neglects to take into account the most vital aspects of human thought: creativity, originality. The second assumption: that emotions should play no role in the human decision-making process, that the cerebral components of the human mind are above the feeling aspects, which are of the body, a mere vessel to be “overcome.”
Bryan Johnson is a man who, as of this October, is no longer injecting himself with the blood of his 17 year old son. The psychological implications of this process—intended to allow the elder Johnson to achieve immortality—are frankly beyond the scope of this paper and I will leave them to be explored in depth by someone else, ideally the younger Johnson’s trained analyst though Bryan Johnson will likely outlive Methuselah before he sends his youngest son “Talmage” to a therapist that practices anything other than CBT—but I digress. He has since pivoted to TPE, Total Plasma Exchange, which is the process of replacing all of the plasma in a human body with Albumin, a naturally occurring protein found in plasma. Albumin typically constitutes about half of plasma-makeup. Bryan Johnson, colloquially known as “the Don’t Die guy” now has double the Albumin of an ordinary man. But is he happy?
What Johnson, through plasma injections, through an all-encompassing health regime which tracks various “metrics” such as sleep diet and exercise, is attempting to do is transcend the limits of the human form. He has marketed his “protocol” as Project Blueprint, which costs $840 a month and is described on his website as “an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself.” The Blueprint website states the following: Bryan Johnson has achieved the best biomarkers of anyone in the world. He is the healthiest person on the planet. He is the most biologically measured person in history. Whether or not these claims are true, whether or not Project Blueprint works or not, and whether or not Bryan Johnson is actually going to die and if so when is unclear at best and of little interest to me.
What is clear is that Johnson is emblematic of a specific substitution of data-driven rationality for critical thought characteristic to the moment, this moment, our moment: a certain renunciation of feeling, of subjectivity, sensuality, of “human nature,” rooted in the desire to absolve oneself not only from the physicality associated with humanness (in other words our corporeal form), but from the interplay between thought and feeling critical to the human condition.
For a moment, let’s take the notion of “common sense” seriously: a sense that is common, an instinct that is shared. The concept becomes synonymous with the “universal instinct,” the universal soul understood by Emerson as a light radiating from each individual, uniting us all so long as we learned to detect it: “He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds…The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also.” Common sense wisdom comes easy, the way truth should. Common sense also allows us to see with our own eyes what Johnson’s biomarkers are blind to: He looks really fucking weird.
The Icarusian drive of Johnson's project, billed as the final frontier in man’s battle over nature, seeks to dominate the animal aspects of our humanity: to defeat inside of us all that is warm, and cosmic, divine—It is presented as a “transcendence.” Its culmination lies in a total rejection of not just the physical form but the physical world entirely. Technological development has always promised the liberation of the individual from the more laborious aspects of existence. While the utopian ideal of automating tasks that limit man’s capacity for self-realization, that are “below” the higher capacities of his nature is a good one, in the past decade such automation has pivoted. A Gordian Knot of technologies have now successfully automated and delegated intrinsic parts of human nature to their separate spheres: Social Media created a space for human connection in the digital sphere, “liberating” socialization from the physical realm. This liberation, however, proves to be a confinement: the natural urge, innate in each of us, to appear with someone gets delegated, constrained, confined. Expedited by the loss of the “in person” entirely during Covid, this phenomenon marks a striking departure from the initial impetus of technological development.
Instead of elevating man, liberating him from his societal duties, we have now automated the most essential and “higher” aspects of human existence. The ultimate aim of this type of automation is not elevation or liberation but a pervasive flattening, a reduction. Johnson may well be the “healthiest person on the planet,” but at what cost? Every second of every moment of every day of his life is regimented, tracked, analyzed, logged. He has transformed his daily life into a means towards the end of more life, his life, apparently precious enough to dissolve all his days. This life is no life at all. The “transcendence” promised by Transhumanists such as Johnson is in fact a nullification of the self, their promotion of artificial intelligence, technological development a mass murder-suicide pact. They are only the most extreme examples of a pervasive mindset enfranchised by our tech plutocrats-in-arms. It is the logical culmination of a century of instrumental rationality in which truth no longer was based in the sensuous world of the individual but instead in “correctness,” in which means were evaluated in terms of how well they conformed to given ends, in which the ends themselves went unquestioned.
Once reason became instrumentalized, that is, disjointed from its original standing as something objective and twisted into a tool, ideals such as Justice, Truth, or Happiness, lost their intellectual roots. Under neoliberalism, which, in the words of David Harvey, “holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions,” these old ideals have been replaced by Profit and the smoothness of relations which enables the entire scope of human action to fall neatly into the domain of the market. The logic of technocrats is unable to weigh ethical dilemmas, to ascribe meaning to a given concept or judge things as “good” or “bad.” Good and bad have no factual basis, they are illusory qualities, nothing in themselves. They are discarded as myths, fantasy. The closest thing the computerized logic knows to good is “efficient,” the nearest thing to bad “inefficient.” In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer explains, “according to formalized reason, despotism, cruelty, oppression are not bad in themselves; no rational agency would endorse a verdict against dictatorship if its sponsors were likely to profit by it.”
This version of what it means to be rational is comforting. An individual’s rationality is based not on himself, but by his ability to complete his given orders efficiently. In other words, he is not expected to make his own rules or dictate his own code by peering deeply inside himself—he is expected to follow. The transhumanist mission is not, as it is billed, to use technological development as a tool that would liberate man from the tasks below his nature, allowing him more free time to adequately express himself, but to outsource his higher abilities to a predictable server.
A central tenet of Jewish thought is the notion of b’tzelem elohim, that we humans are “made in the image of god.” In the long history of philosophical consideration of what it means to be human, the same notion appears centuries and centuries later, in Konigsberg, as Kant proclaims that humans are distinct from both god and animal in that we are created and creative. To be made, created, we exist, and by existing we are privy to all that nature surrounds us with, and respond—we see a blue sky and sunlight reflected back at us from a still lake, and we know beauty; we feel the first bitter wind of fall, and we know fear; we look into the eyes of another, and we know love. We are made, and because of the fact of our existence, we feel. A mother first knows her child has been born when she hears the sound of them crying. Before thought there is first feeling. In the image of god—who creates, we are rendered inherently creative beings, divine. And within us are the forces of nature and they emerge in the form of emotion; and also within us is the potential for divinity, for original thought and action and the ability to render our will upon the world—the dialectic between these two aspects of our being, this continuous and unresolvable interaction, is the mark of humanity. The logic of technocrats discards our animalistic attributes as something to be overcome. Their philosophy (if we can call it that) is based solely in the cognitive function, in a conception of reason that is instrumental, conforming given ends to the most logical means, in a psychiatric understanding of the mind that refutes psychoanalysis. It analyzes “beauty” and finds a pleasing combination of colors; it is tasked with understanding fear and it points to a Pew Research Study; it assesses love and discovers phenomenal congruency, a Darwinian hormonal reaction, something about the color red or wide birthing hips.
By attempting to create a superhuman form of intelligence, these men are playing god. In a paper published in early April by Google DeepMind, researchers advise that AGI could be plausible within the next five years. They define AGI as “an AI system that matches or exceeds that of the 99th percentile of skilled adults on a wide range of non-physical tasks,” such as “conversational systems, agentic systems, reasoning, learned novel concepts, and some aspects of recursive improvement.” In acknowledging their limits, they concede:
we rely significantly on a few background assumptions and beliefs about how AGI will be developed:
1. No human ceiling: Under the current paradigm (broadly interpreted), we do not see any fundamental blockers that limit AI systems to human-level capabilities. We thus treat even more powerful capabilities as a serious possibility to prepare for.
That the developers behind AI see no inherently human capacities irreplicable in a computer should come as no surprise. But this self-identified hubris is critical to our understanding of their work: their success depends not only on their ability to make AI more like man, but on whether or not they can make man more like AI.
If technological progress continues to be left to its own devices, if AGI becomes a reality, our world is going to change very much, very quickly. The center is not holding and the world is wobbling and there’s something fishy about all this, the edges are blurring and the veil is lifting—It is now April, and United States Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed Federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione, in accordance with “President Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”
The assassination of Brian Thompson was irrational. In the wake of its CEO’s murder, United HealthCare did not suddenly cease denying, defending, or deposing. In terms of means and ends, Luigi’s action accomplished nothing. In terms of means and ends, perhaps it would have been more logical for Mr. Mangione to study up, go to law school, get the ACLU in on it, work up a good case, take it all the way up the chain of command, face the nine-robed Supreme Court and go RBG on United HealthCare’s ass until HEALTHCARE FOR ALL was enshrined in law, our twenty-eighth amendment: commence utopia. But to believe in this daydream would also be irrational. To believe that there is hope to change the world for the better in the face of a structure that is set up so that the masses of society stay just where they are, the integrity of the structure in question being reliant on the rest of us staying just where we are—this would be not only irrational, but blind. “Rationality” so dictated is thus premised on concealing the illogical nature of so-called reason in a false world.
The execution of Mr. Thompson was in accordance somehow with an older, objective reason, the reason of the Old Testament: that a man who is responsible for countless preventable deaths due to denied coverage, for driving families into debt needlessly, for quantifying the value of individual lives, who gets to decide who lives or dies, rendering himself godlike, should be gunned down in the street is biblical. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
That Brian Johnson, on the other hand, is funneling what must be millions of dollars into his attempt to live forever, financed in part by his snake-oil algorithmic scheme while the vast majority of Americans struggle to live their fair share; that we have the medical technology for illnesses to be treated, for emergencies to be handled, for lives to be saved but that access to this technology is sequestered by an ivory tower of dollar bills—this is damning. That technological development, meanwhile, is focused on endowing artificial intelligence with superhuman capabilities though AI safety researchers, on average, acknowledge that the emergence of AGI would carry around a 30 percent risk of an existential threat to human existence—this is terrifying. That in the wake of an open letter (co-signed by Elon Musk, for one) calling for a six-month pause of AI development, warning of this existential threat, released in March of 2023, that nothing at all was done, that in the two years since there has been no such pause at all and that these AI giants are now in bed with the administration, an administration that is positioning a laissez-faire artificial intelligence standard, that Mr. Musk and his team of 20 year old incels have been given unfettered access to our most confidential data under the auspice of “cost-cutting”—this is infuriating.
In the early months of 2025 I was eating greek yogurt with granola, making coffee at home, drinking not enough water probably too much beer smoking too many cigarettes and forgetting to wash my face at night. I was listening only to albums, remembering to call my family at an appropriate frequency, and hanging out late into the nights with my friends, most of whom agreed that the world seemed to be ending. It is difficult to put your finger on one particular problem, or to stick to any sort of routine, when you feel daily the weight of existential dread. The only thing that feels especially pertinent to a person who is feeling the weight of existential dread is How to Forget about it Tonight. Sometimes I would try to soothe myself by deciding that maybe I was being dramatic, that maybe childless twenty-four year old women have always felt some sort of existential dread throughout history, no matter the political situation. Then I would think about my grandpa, who turns 100 in May, and fought in Iwo Jima, and how he told me these were the darkest times he’s seen.
It’s tempting to give up. To stop reading the news, to give oneself that blissful ignorance—to distract yourself: watch a show or go to the gym build a butt build a whole new soul or rather tear down the one you have like a prewar victorian build a prefab model in its place furnish it however it seems like everyone else does buy some nice clothes go to madewell get your skincare game up watch some short form media plan a rebrand and prioritize peace. Download hinge. Etc. The other night someone asked me what I thought about Free Will, i.e., Did I Believe in It. I joked that once a buddy of mine let me know he saw a thirty-minute youtube video that proved, definitively, we didn’t have it. Then I told the truth, which is corny, the way bare-faced truths usually are: that I believe we have the power to change the future!
The way things are going is bad. It’s all bad, all across the board. Things have been bad for quite some time now, and within the framework of our existing structure I see little potential for change. The benefit of hindsight teaches us that things are always going one way until they aren’t anymore. Until something, or someone, comes along and changes the trajectory of history. The scientistic mindset teaches us that if something is unlikely it won’t happen. But unlikely things happen every day. Lightning strikes. Sometimes it even strikes twice. If we think for ourselves, if we listen to our guts, and tune out all the noise, I do believe that we can change the future. Trump and Elon are tearing the system down. Maybe something fertile can grow on that overturned soil.
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