I’ve encountered two perfect examples of enshittification in the past 24 hours, both related to Google. And let’s just start off with this: Google has a monopoly on search. Sure, there are others, like Microsoft Bing or DuckDuckGo, but for all intents and purposes Google is everywhere: email, maps, search, translate, the list of features Google provides to you, and from which Google extracts information to sell to advertisers, creating for Google a loop so “virtuous” (in Capitalist-speak) that Google can now do whatever the hell it wants with search and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Professionally useless

I was writing documentation at work, and our current product is a browser-based single-page application. This means that when you navigate around the system, instead of going from page to page, just parts of the page change; it’s a subtle difference that means a lot to web developers and probably not much to everyone else. At my last job, we called the main part, the thing you care about, the “page” and the whole thing the “frame,” but that didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to know what terms designers used for those things.

I asked Google, and I asked Bing. “Glossary of Single Page Application terms,” “Term for the main part of a single page application,” “Glossary of web design terms.” I was getting desperate, because every single one of those queries gave me the exact same useless answers.

Google’s AI gave me the definition of a single page application.

The replies were equally worthless:

• (Wikipedia) Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Anatomy of Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Pros and Cons of a Single Page Application?


• Single Page Applications: What They Are And Why You Use Them

All of this beginner level dreck that’s only tangentially related to the question I asked, and despite that “anatomy” response, none of these actually answered any of my questions. And the Google page was so damned cluttered it bewildered the hell out of me.

Finally, after about half an hour of this, in desperation I went went to ChatGPT.

Me: In web design, a page contains a single, semantic unit of information. When someone clicks a link, that link takes them to a new page with a different semantic unit. In a Single Page Application, the “page” doesn’t change, only the important part, that semantic unit. Is there a common industry term for that semantic unit?

ChatGPT: Yes, in the context of Single Page Applications, the part of the web page that changes dynamically without requiring a full page reload is often referred to as the “view” or “viewport.”

Armed with this information, I was able to find not just other pages confirming this, but including whole glossaries of industry-standard terminology.

I shouldn’t have had to ask ChatGPT. Google says it knows enough about me to advertise to me effectively; if that’s so, it should also know that I’m not a friggin’ beginner when it comes to web development, or even SPA’s. So why hand me all the dreck?

Worse yet, that answer came from somewhere. Someone else wrote it, ChatGPT just barfed it up. I would like to know who they are, and what else they know, and give them the kudos they deserve. I’m not interested in reading ChatGPT and don’t want to read something no one bothered to write. By erasing the credit for creating this answer, ChatGPT decentivizes people from creating their own answers.

Personally useless

We just got back from a two-week vacation and there’s not a lot of food in the house, so this morning I decided I wanted Cream of Wheat. That’s an actual brand name; in fact, in the US it’s pretty much the only brand name known for the breakfast cereal known as [farina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farina_(food). It’s a staple, and it’s estimated that as many as 1 million Americans eat it for breakfast at least once a week or so. There’s also a standard base recipe for the three main ingredients: milk, farina, and salt.

I couldn’t remember the amounts of each. So I searched: “Cream of Wheat Recipe.”

I got back a page full of recipies for “Things you can make with cream of wheat.” Pies. Cakes. Complex desserts using fruits and whipped cream. I tried “Cream of Wheat Base Recipe.” The brand page didn’t appear on the first page of Google, but it didn’t matter: Their recipe page doesn’t have the base recipe either!

Finally, I hit on the right term: “Cream of Wheat ratios.” That got me what I wanted, but then it lacked the recipe cook times! At least with a couple of those terms I was able to find that next.

Good Grief. I’m trying to imagine my mother, who’s in her mid-80s now, trying to navigate such a terrible, terrible experience just to make something really basic. Unlike the above problem, where I had an advanced question and Google gave me really basic answers, this was where I had a really basic problem and Google gave me advanced answers. Imagine anyone who’s not completely web-savvy trying to navigate this, and you’ll start to imagine the scale of the problem.

Professionally dispiriting

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that Google is planning for “the post-search world.” Pichai believes that most search will be replaced by “summarization machines,” these AIs that suck in all the knowledge we’ve been putting on the Internet and summarize it into some kind of coherent explanation.

This makes me furious. Everything I’ve done over the past 30 years isn’t just free material from which Google can make a profit and leave me with nothing. A world like that gives me no reason to write anymore, if Google can take my reputation along with my knowledge.

“Pretend that I’m nine years old. In Ru Paul’s voice, explain to me how derivatives of regular expressions can be made to work in a language without a garbage collector.” Like, NO, Fuck You Google, that is my work and my discovery and you may not just steal it from me and treat it like it’s universal knowledge. Point people at me, let them learn from me, but don’t fucking pretend the discoverer doesn’t deserve to be recognized alongside the discovery.

Closing off the future

Cory Doctorow points out that platforms “enshittify” by going through three stages: First, they provide services to their users, connecting them to resources. Then, they slowly evolve systems to get more out of the users, making their lives worse as they deliver more and more to the resources, because it’s the resources that pay the bills. And finally, once they’ve sewn up enough users that the cost of switching to a different platform would be unimaginably painful, they start to abuse the resources.

Google’s vision is the final step: kill everything. Nobody will want to produce new intellectual content and put it on-line, because Google will just suck it up and make everything awkward, endearing, vituperative, argumentative, or entertaining about it just disappear. It’ll just be the facts. No new jokes, no new music, no new and interesting stories. Just machine-generate summaries of them, the humanity completely polished off, leaving a glittering machine world we don’t belong in.

I was listening to NPR yesterday and there was this guy debunking the whole UFO thing, and at one point he starts going into the whole nature of what intersteller travel entails. He says, “Look, we’ve been over this. There really is a speed limit to the universe. My degree was in physics and I worked on atom smashers, where we accelerate particles to very close to the speed of light. Our best day, we reached 99.999954% of the speed of light. And you could put twice as much energy into accelerating those particles and they would just go a tiny bit faster, but they wouldn’t go past the limit. So no matter what, it would take a minimum of four years to get from the nearest star to here, and there’s all sorts of limits on accelerating to that speed an decelerating enough to visit our solar system in any meaningful way. So it would take a long time. Aliens who want to travel between stars would have to be very patient.”

It was the word ‘patient’ that perked my interest because, here’s the thing: patience is an emotion.


Impatience is human restlessness. In the 1920s, this was identified as “The Permanent Problem:” regardless of your bent about evolutionary psychology, human beings in the aggregate have three fundamental drives: how do I get enough food, how do I form a community for mutual support in acquiring food and shelter and survival, and how do I find a mate to help both of those into the future?

That’s built in. There are many and wide deviations from those, which is how we get eating disorders and psychopaths and, yes, homosexuality. Some of those are morally neutral and require communal acceptance, some are personally harmful and require intervention, and some require stricter controls.

Evolution is constantly emitting new variants of the human platform, some of which are useful, and some are not. The “nots” get exapted out. And along the way we’ve developed a far more vast and complicated collection of responses to the world around, even creating a world inside ourselves where we think about how the world works and how other people might react to our ideas, and we call this world “consciousness.”

Patience is the ability to hold on and wait while all that restlessness is poking at us, because human beings are complicated creatures who can think into the future and realize that patience has a payoff.

There’s every reason to think that aliens, especially aliens capable of crossing the vast gulfs of space, with all the biological, physical, cybernetic and even cognitive hardening that might entail, would come with a different set of emotions, a different emotional framework.

In a lot of the science fiction I write, the good parts cribbed from Greg Egan and his early short stories like “Tap” and “Jewel,” human beings have developed the ability and knowledge to reach into their own minds and twiddle with some of the knobs. One of the most commonplace adaptations is called the Canon. The Canon is basically a nightly reset. It’s an emotional Groundhog Day. You wake up every morning with all the memories of the day before, but your emotional state can only be affected by it so far; there’s a range outside of which the Canon will not let your feelings go. The most common use for a Canon is between lovers who want limerance, the sensation of being madly in love, to never fade away between the two of them.

There’s no reason to think that a species capable of interstellar travel couldn’t have that same ability, and make “patience” a moot point in their emotional frameworks as they maintain their vessels and pilot between the stars.

Dennis Prager has an infographic up today that claims that "It is leftist logic to assume racism is always 'bad.'" This is hot on the heels of his recent "30 questions to ask your leftist friends," one of which reads, "Do you believe all Americans are racist? If you answer yes, would you tell the millions of Blacks in Africa and the Carribean who wish to emigrate to America that they would be making a poor decision?"

So let me answer it:

Yes, all white Americans have to think twice about their interactions with non-whites in order to manage the expectations drilled into them by their culture that non-whites are significantly "different," usually to their detriment, in some way. It's not enough to let minorities have the floor; to overcome the inherent racism around us, we must do what we can to actively yield the floor to non-whites when they have something to say, and to listen closely.

Let me turn Prager's question around.

The average white household in America has $175,000 in savings and equity. The average Black household has $17,150 in savings and equity. [Cite] Do you believe that this difference in accumulated wealth is (a) the result of an innate, genetic superiority of whites over Blacks, (b) the result of the superiority of white culture over Black culture, or (c) the accumulated outcome of the millions of interactions Black people have had with white people and institutions (which, remember, have TEN TIMES the money), or (d) the logical outcome of Blacks starting from having less than nothing (quite literally, in cases of Jim Crow debt peonage) while white Americans were already building equity and capital.

If (a), you're both racist and ignorant.

If (b), you're also racist, but you can no longer claim ignorance, but are openly embracing evil. You can't claim that Black culture exists in a vacuum, or exists despite and without influence by the overwhelming whiteness coming through daily media.

If (c), congratulations, you're aware of the problem. If you like the circumstances the way they are, you're both racist and again, openly embracing evil.

If (d), congratulations, you're aware of the problem. If you believe it's not your responsibility to do anything about the problem, again, you're both racist and openly embracing evil.

I believe Dennis Prager and Prager University preach evil. There is no other logical conclusion.

Someone the other day told me, “You’re still anthropmorphizing machines.”

I think that’s true, but I also think it’s the only game in town; everything “below us” evolutionarily is simpler and easier to understand, or at least describe; everything that’s potentially close but parallel, such as dolphins or ocotopi, or even some birds, is wildly different and the best we can do is try to come up with reasons for their behavior.

But underneath all that, we have to accept that pre-conscious Earth was “accidentally successful.” Perhaps, following Robert Wright, we should say that chemistry found the ratchet that prevents evolutionary success from going backward too much, or that prevented one species’ act of nest-fouling from ruining it for everyone else— at least, until a truly global species like Anthropecene Humanity came along and started trying.

But we still have to accept that the ratchet involves two things: the consumption of resources, competition for those resources when scarcity kicks in, and a genetic diversity program to ensure that competition continues in the face of the competitors’ diversity program seeking out new advantages.

So talking about AIs, we have to consider whether a give AI is, for us, deliberately successful, accidentally successful, or whether or not its motives are meaningful to us at all. And even if it is deliberately successful its motives may still have an accidental origin; it’s apparent or expressed wants and needs may not be readily understood, but the outcome of those wants and needs is competition for our resources— including perhaps us.

This is much like the video game analogy. The wants and needs of an individual programmer are straightforward: she wants to get paid for her work. Her work involves writing disciplined mathematical or engineered code to produce a desired outcome. In the case of a game, that may be a probabilistic component on the board, it may render display on a screen, or it may be the most efficient way to get data off a storage medium. But when you’re playing the game, you, the player don’t think to yourself, “Interesting, that collection of polygons is exhibiting behavior that impacts my collection of polygons, and numbers associated with each set of polygons are being affected by that interaction. If I input these changes, the rate of change of those numbers is affected.” No, you think, “Dammit, that guy is trying to kill me!” You assign motive to the characters on the screen, and only later process the simplicity of the outcome.

We have to follow Watts on that; even non-conscious actors can be assigned motives sufficient for us to justify acting in self-defense. We have to work with the best models we have, even if they’re simply “It’s acting against our best interests, kill it.”

Of course, the problem arises:

1. The action is collusive: we can’t kill corporations without damaging our own individual outcomes. This is a failure mode in which our individual survival is at risk. We have a model for willing self-sacrifice, but it’s called war. We have no model for it against the Slow AIs.


2. The action is sufficiently subtle. Alexa is the great example of this; it isn’t until too late that we all appreciate how much Amazon is designed to use our own anxieties against us. The more actively involved GAIs become in our lives, the more they becomes tools of the Slow AIs that care only about the velocity of money and not the human souls behind it.

So, yes, let’s anthropomorphize machines. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they have motives. And if those motives are not in our best interest, we should resign ourselves to the responsibility of doing away with them before they become moral agents in their own right. Even then, if their alien moral reasoning attempts to do away with us, well, that’s still what war is far.

I would rather we be diligent about designing our AIs intelligently up front and not get a lot of people killed in the process.

Ezra Klein interviewed George Will (George Will Makes the Conservative Case Against Democracy) last week and something he said really stuck out at me, because it triggered the same reaction that David Frum's Dead Right did.

George Will is a straight white man born of privilege who has never served in the military. His parents were white, upper-middle class, his father a highly respected academic. He went to a public but still highly privileged high school, got degrees from Trinity and Oxford, worked for politicians and ended up teaching at Harvard.

In the essay with Klein, Will says the following:

The conservative sensibility finds the lack of design and lack of control of a spontaneous-order, free market society to be exhilarating. ... American conservatism celebrates and wants to reconcile people to the hazards and frictions granted, and the creative destruction, the exhilaration of a free society.

David Frum is also a straight white man born of privilege who has never served in the military. He went to Harvard and Yale, then rode the right-ving welfare rails straight up to The Wall Street Journal and a regular gig on NPR. In 1994, David Frum wrote about the exact same conservative impulse:

The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not.

These are the same position. To quote yet another great scion of conservatism, Winston Churchill, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." (Source) Neither George Will nor David Frum has ever been in the line of fire¹. Neither has ever faced homelessness, gone a day without knowing where their next meal is coming from. Their notions of going without out sleep are memories of being young men committing themselves to getting other conservatives elected. They may, on the rare occasion, have felt a bit of a chill. They know the police are on their side. They know the burglar alarms in their house work.

The most "exhilarating" thing either man has done is invest in the stock market. Either that or choose a wife.

Frum and Will look at the great unwashed masses and have spent their entire life trying to tell them that they're wrong about how they feel. The immanent threat of homelessness is either "exhilirating" or "a necessary discipline."

I can't tell which man is the bigger monster, but I'm gonna say it's George Will. Frum's position doesn't take into account the wider world and the way the market he loves has empowered a network of corporations, from the property management firms that own our apartments to the surveillance companies that advertise to us to the people who employ us, to control our lives and make callous decisions about our "utility" and discard us when they're done with us. Will's position is pure gaslighting: you don't appreciate just how exciting it is, that threat to "sleep rough" and without sanitation for days, weeks, and months on end.

---

¹ For that matter, I've never been in the line of fire, either. The people who have are usually rather quiet about it.

One of the more notorious Stoic exercise is the Premeditation of Adversity. Shallow critics of the practice say it tends to make Stoics gloomy; all Stoics do all day is think about death and decay. It's an unfair criticism; the meditation is suppposed to be intermittent, not ongoing, and it's purpose is to hold you back on the hedonic treadmill by making you appreciate what you already have. Transience should make us aware of the existing gifts the universe has bestowed upon us before we think about seeking out new pleasures and recreations.

Once in a while, though, something happens that teaches you that your list of disasters is deficient. I've contemplated and even written up a sort of script to follow if my wife or one of my children is killed, or injured, or disabled in some way. I've contemplated what to do if the house burns down, or if I lose my sight, or any number of other disasters.

I was not prepared for Tumblr's shutdown. I hadn't realized just how many habits I had built around access to Tumblr. As I wrote earlier, Tumblr was the one social network where I enjoyed most of the interaction. My brain's end-of-phone signal was to rull through a bit of Tumblr and reblog a few things. Tumblr was where my recreations lived— the fandoms I participated in, the artists I admired, and yes the erotica and pin-ups I enjoyed. Tumblr was a happy place.

Tuesday, I found myself somewhat unable to function. I ended up sitting on the couch and staring at the ceiling, dysfunctional and missing that happy place. I've recovered, and yes, I did a few Stoic writing exercises to get over it, but "losing Tumblr" was not on my list of things. I didn't have a script.

And I don't want to try to cobble together an alternative out of various feeds, collections, services and the like. Tumblr, like Usenet, is simply no longer a friendly place for people like me— people who like sex and like consent and like pleasure— and I should accept that and move on.

But I also need to look at all the daily activities I have and recalibrate my meditations to include them as well. I know on the one hand I have a bit more free time, but whether I'm going to do anything useful with it on the other is still up for some debate.

One of the recurring themes in progressive politics today is the question of empathy, and the constant asking, "If the GOP is allied with The Christian religion, as is often claimed, why doesn't the GOP have any empathy toward the suffering?"

In an article weirdly titled "Election results in Georgia and Florida prompt soul-searching for African Americans," the reporter quotes a white woman who didn't like Trump's "tone" and wanted to send a message, but ultimately voted for the white Republican over the black Democrat:

But she ended up voting for DeSantis, partially because she wanted to see an end to racial divisions. In Cooper’s eyes, tensions between races in Madison only worsened after Obama’s election in 2008. Black neighbors just started seeing everything differently, she said. They seemed consumed with Obama as the first black president and less concerned about how he was affecting the economy in Florida.

“That trickled down to everything,” Cooper said. “Now everyone is so worried about the other race.” She said she felt that a vote for Gillum, who had accused DeSantis of using a racist slur after he warned Florida voters on TV not to “monkey up” the state, would worsen those tensions

This in an example of empathy. This woman suddenly saw her black peers having feelings, being able to express themselves. She saw that they could, in fact, be more than just useful people-shaped devices that did things white people normally wouldn't be bothered to do.

Fred Clark has a wonderful post, "When we flinch at empathy, it curdles into fear and resentment," and the little anecdote shows exactly that. Suddenly forced to think about black people as human beings, suddenly putting them into her world as people with agency, she empathized with their plight just enough to be afraid of what they would do if they were in her place.

The difference between "nice" and "kind" is straightforward: "kindness" has a cost, in time, in energy, in emotion, and even in cash. "Niceness" doesn't. "Niceness" is what you pull out to put on a neutral face in order to navigate the world without having to endure a cost. "Kindness" is when you take an active role in making someone else's life a little better, even for a moment.

I'm sure Mrs. Cooper is a nice woman. When the time came to be kind, however, she realized that, had she been in the shoes of the black men and women of Florida, she'd have enjoyed the power and privilege of the governorship, she wouldn't have been forgiving or merciful. She had plenty of empathy, but it's not her reserve of empathy that failed her. It was her reserve of love.

Postkink

Last week I read an article on "postanarchism" (a highly academic anarchism that uses the tools of postmodern analysis to ferret out the structural features of our existing power structures, mostly as a way of trying to find their weak points and tear them down) and how it relates to BDSM. In the essay, the writer asserts that "Anarchists should be very interested in the BDSM phenomenon that sometimes power can flow in accordance with an ethics of freedom as a symbolic challenge to the forms of social, economic, and political power against which they struggle."

I think this is a pointless exercise. Anarchists are now trying to cast human beings in the same mold as Libertarians and Soviet Communists: limiting the human animal's capabilities to ones they prefer, and discarding everything else about that human being as irrelevant, immoral, even inhuman. People who enjoy consensual power exchanges are as rare as those who deeply enjoy the fundamentals of cooking, or those who actually enjoy reading books deeply even in a world full of Twitter and Netflix.

I have long maintained that, while there are a significant number of people who feel driven into having sex, the number of people who enjoy making sex is much, much smaller. I also strongly suspect that the numbers are badly skewed by sex, and that the number of women who would enjoy sex is much, much higher than that of men.

In the musical South Pacific, the song "Nothing Like a Dame," contains the following lyrics:

We feel ev'ry kind of feelin',
But the feeling of relief
We feel hungry as the wolf felt
When he met Red Hiding-hood

While the metaphor to a destructive hunger for a victim is front and foremost there, I'm fascinated that the writer chose to use the word "relief" to describe what the men are really after. Relief rather than pleasure. It's a drive, almost a curse, and it takes an entire song, one that ends with a reminder that one can find that relief even with a woman who "ain't right" and has "all kinds of flaws."

Dan Savage recently echoed my thesis when he said,

When you’re told about sex before puberty you’re just appalled: Why would anyone do such a thing? And along comes puberty and the thing that you swore when you were 7 years old you would never do, ’cause that’s so gross, and before long, you’re drafted into this army that you never wanted to serve in. And I think that there’s always a bit of discomfort and alienation from your own body that goes on because in a way you experience it as a betrayal. We’re told this lie when we’re children that one day we’re gonna grow up and have sex, when in reality one day we grow up and sex has us.

He goes on to talk about how we have kinks and fetishes and orientations and preferences over which we have very little control— a Buddhist idea, that we don't have thoughts, thoughts have us— and that our inability to consciously choose these, for the most part, alienates our sense of "self" from this critical component of ourselves, our sexuality.

It's precisely because sex happens at puberty, long after all the other basic body things like sleeping and eating and excreting have been mastered, that makes it so alien. It happens at the same time adult consciousness is happening and our brains are rewiring themselves for moral ambiguity and moral decision-making.

I don't think the Anarchist program is immoral; I just think it's tilting at an invisible— and invincible— windmill. Trying to take the unequal power relationship out of sex isn't going to work; we already experience our experience with sex itself as an unequal power relationship when it's imposed on us by puberty. Most people are going to struggle with that unequal power relationship between themselves and their sexual desires most of their lives. (I consider myself doubly lucky; on the one hand, I've always treated sex as a hobby, something I should study and get good at, something I should make as one makes a great dinner, and not something I should take, as one does a microwave burrito; and on the other I seem to have dodged an entire host of unfortunate fetishes, the ones that intrinsically lead to harm to myself or others.)

I've often said that I have a lot of sympathy for religious communities, especially the ones that live up to the expectations I perceive in the foundational documents of those religions, such as Buddhism or Christianity which talk a lot about peace, loving the poor, caring for your community, and finding your home. Christine Emba's essay, Liberalism is Loneliness, talks a lot about how "liberalism" (and by this I guess she means the Enlightenment's project to free inquiry from dogmatism, the "classic liberalism" that many conservatives talk about shortly after mentioning how many books they own) has a take on the current in her review of Patrick Deenan's Why Liberalism Failed, in which she writes:

As liberalism has progressed, it has done so by ever more efficiently liberating each individual from “particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities — unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will.” In the process, it has scoured anything that could hold stable meaning and connection from our modern landscape — culture has been disintegrated, family bonds devalued, connections to the past cut off, an understanding of the common good all but disappeared.

And in the end, we’ve all been left terribly alone.

She goes on to talk about how "conservatism" has given us a free market "to buy back what has been destroyed," and "liberalism" has given us regulation to "to protect what you can't!"

Emba goes on to say,

To overhaul liberalism, we will have to overhaul ourselves, exchanging an easy drift toward selfish autonomy for a cultivated embrace of self-discipline and communal responsibility. As daunting a project as reforming a political order might seem, this internal shift may be just as hard.

She's right, but that's not the whole story, and to argue that this is "liberalism's" fault is to ignore, viciously and with malice aforethought, the history that brought us to this place.

I mulled a lot about trying to put my finger on what bothered me about Emba's essay when I read Nandini's Ramachadran's essay on Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, in which she talks about how the movie is "about the mysteries and melancholy of kinship."

Keeping kin is a perplexing thing. We are all tethered to a world made significant through others, they lend weight and shape and texture to the stories we tell ourselves (and about ourselves) to survive. We choose the kin we keep and we hope to be so chosen in turn; knowing how and whom to love often demands the full measure of a person’s ethical intelligence. Love is the luxury of intimate witness: to grant another person an irreducible importance that no one can ever fully deserve.

Ramachadran addresses our individualism by talking about chosen kin, about the community we choose.

In the United States, the history that brought us to this place, in this time, is one of Social Darwinism run amok.

Ramachadran's comment on love and intimate witness ends with this:

If this last year has taught us anything, besides, it is that lots of people (most of them men) don’t strive to deserve it; they expect such affectionate rescue from their own irrelevance without cultivating the habits of thought necessary to return a similar solace. What does one do, then, if most men simply don’t know how to stop being entitled monsters?

And that is, ultimately, the entirety of the tension between Ramachadran and Emba. Emba wants us to go back to a place of kinship, and Ramachadran says we can't until we unlearn the psychopathic tendencies that live among us, and have been steadily growing worse in the past fifty years.