What Do Ezra Klein and Miranda July Have in Common?
the greatest poverty/is not to live/in a physical world
The answer to my titular question, on the surface, is not much. (See, that’s how you get it done in this newsletter game, that’s how the sausage gets made, the provocative, portentous rhetorical question, the counterintuitive juxtaposition, you’re in the hands of a master here.) He’s a political journalist and podcaster, an explainer of policy who delights in big ideas. She’s a novelist, filmmaker, and performance artist, interested in small moments of intimacy and eccentricity. Can I make it any more obvious?
Their publics don’t overlap much, and their subject matter could hardly be more different - she’s an artist in every sense, a aesthetic polymath who has succeeded in performance art, film, novel writing, and now in essaying. He’s the consummate liberal wonk, a reassuring, omnicompetent voice of sanity who soothes us in saying that there is a technocratic path to a better, more humane future. And yet I find myself linking the two of them, because each embodies a refusal that feels central to our era: the refusal to accept the mundane. In the last couple of years, Klein has pivoted towards being a cheerful prophet of AI maximalism, in a way I find genuinely endearing. July has become an avatar of an uncompromising vision of middle aged female sexual and personal agency, a standard bearer for women who have been constrained by sexism for too long and are finally demanding more. I find this demand to be righteous. Yet I have been critical of both of these perspectives, despite my genuine sympathy for both, and in both cases I have caught a not-inconsiderable amount of blowback. But I think that I’m right.
Klein, in his earnest credulity towards the claims of AI maximalists, shows us one way this refusal plays out. Ezra’s entranced by the prospect of radical technological transformation, by the possibility that generative models or robotics or biotech are going to utterly remake the human condition. He’s interviewed dozens of people on the subject, and though he hedges and qualifies, there’s always an underlying openness to the idea that we are at the brink of a sci-fi future. “Person after person… has been coming to me saying… We’re about to get to artificial general intelligence[!]” says Ezra, in his breathless style, not pausing to acknowledge that every one of those persons is someone who has direct financial investment not in AGI being real and imminent but in the impression that AGI is real and imminent. Klein does not want to let go of the possibility that he might live in Star Trek or Blade Runner or Terminator; he wants to believe that our lives can be so thoroughly altered that the weight of ordinary existence will be lifted. And I promise I’m not blowing smoke when I say that, where I find most AI evangelists to be disingenuous charlatans, I find everything Ezra says to be aching with sincerity and sentiment. Which, analytically, is of course the exact problem. He is too eager to believe.
July offers a different but parallel vision. Klein offers deliverance through technology, a depersonalized and inhuman force that restructures the human world. July offers a profoundly humanistic and self-empowered vision of change, deliverance through woman’s consciousness-raising and refusal. Her recent novel All Fours portrays the life of a middle-aged woman, a version of herself, who continually cycles through a roster of attractive lovers, as though her forties and fifties might be a carousel of passion and reinvention. Her newsletter turns this fictive version into a kind of self-help guruism, a set of lived instructions by which one might live. You don’t have to be constrained in your choices to the same shitty dude(s) who you’ve been forced to deal with for the past however many years, she tells aging women. You can go find something better. And, genuinely, what could be more sympathetic than that? Despite the rancor with which my past criticism of July was greeted, I have no doubt that women in general and middle aged women in particularly have been shafted, given a shitty deal, and it’s absolutely right to tell them that they are under no obligation to stay with the men who have disappointed them. There’s a charm in her sensibility, a sweetness in her effort to conjure lives most haven’t lived. But the fantasy is unmistakable. For July, there’s a stubborn unwillingness to accept that most of us will not have endless love affairs, that our sexual options narrow with age, that our bodies decline.
The fantasy in each case is different, but the resistance is the same. Klein and July, in their very different ways, are telling us: the world must be more than it appears. And what I am telling them (and you) in turn is that, actually, the world is pretty much exactly as it appears, and our task as adults is equal parts getting the most we can out of it and accepting the narrow constraints of the possible in our disenchanted, mundane lives.