The Syllogism Machine

Chapter Four: Unification Resisted

 

As we’ve seen in previous chapters, thought leaders in the fintech space during the late pre-Attunement period tended to support Unification, some even championing devices to achieve it, but this sentiment was not necessarily universal. Dissidents, degenerates, intellectuals, perverts, mutants, and artists rejected Unification theory outright, even suggesting that it might be a sacrilege against human nature. The narrative of one such individual, whose footnote of a tale can serve as an admonishment to likeminded reprobates, will fill this chapter in our history of pre-Attunement social structures.

Glenn Crizzler (1982-circa 2056), socialist cultural critic and reviewer, was born to an upper middle-income couple in the Midwest United States (perhaps the most powerful nation-state of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, gone the way of every other such state after Attunement), a second son taking much more from his ditzy, prodigal mother than his prudent father, much less athletic than his older brother and significantly uglier, an all-around ne’er-do-well who couldn’t settle on a profession in life and who moved from job to job as easily as walking. He wrote sporadically in his youth, but steadied into a constant stream of forgettable but astringent prose beginning in his early forties, writing essays and reviews on all aspects of mainstream culture, almost always critical and almost all of them from what he called a “democratic socialist” lens, a phrase known to post-Attunement thought leaders as an oxymoron.

He published extensively until his break from reality in 2055, though he released all of his drivel through small, independent channels, and none of it gained any attention until a group of revolutionaries known as the Party of Unbridled Mutualism (POUM) began to circulate his tracts in the decade leading up to Unification (November 5, 2104). He had, by this point, descended into lunacy and died sometime in late 2055 or early 2056, so he never lived to see the minor resurgence of his work, which is probably all the better for him, since he is only mentioned now to illustrate the dangers of non-unificatory thinking. No piece of his work can be taken seriously post-Attunement.

Why the POUM chose to revive this particular man’s work is unknown. They published pamphlets and handbound tracts written by a variety of well-known subversives, from the first anarchists and communists to the later left-leaning public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Richard D. Wolff. Minor writers, like Crizzler, also made their way from the POUM’s presses to the eyes of readers, but these lesser-known egalitarians wrote much earlier (middle nineteenth to middle twentieth century), putting their works in the public domain. Crizzler’s work, however, still required some financial investment, since his grandchildren had rights to his estate during the years of POUM’s existence (2089-2104). While it made some financial sense to publish a book by Chomsky or Parenti, whose works could still raise respectable sums from the pockets of mouth-breathing, bleeding-heart equality dreamers, publishing Crizzler’s polemics did not. At best, the POUM’s investments in the rights to his works broke even.

At least some historians of this period have suggested that Crizzler’s final act of revolution, which we will relate as this chapter closes, put him on the POUM’s radar, perhaps for its blatant violence. Others have proposed that some high member of the group (which was supposed to be administered horizontally but was not) was related to Crizzler in some way, perhaps a great-grandchild. No such linkage has ever been proven, but it does remain a possibility, given the common usage of aliases and noms de guerre within the group. We will remain agnostic on why the POUM published his work so fervently. For our purposes, why Crizzler, of the thousands of socialist authors toiling away in the pre-Attunement century, should have been noticed by the POUM is not extremely important. He was, and that’s really the only fact that matters to this chapter.  

However, before continuing Crizzler’s narrative, we do find it interesting to note the POUM’s reliance on money and profit to maintain its operations. In addition to a small press that published the aforementioned pieces of debauched literature and sold bits of merchandise, the POUM took in money through illegal means. (They were revolutionaries, after all.) On paper, the POUM was just that, a political party that published political literature, but its thousands of members (starting in the dozens and then ballooning in 2095 when the War for Attunement began) were often arrested in connection with bank robberies, armored car hijackings, and even jewel thievery. One case taken to court involved the high-level extortion of the mayor of Kansas City, Kansas, whom a POUM member had apparently photographed in flagrante delicto with an eggplant, a jar of mayonnaise, and a bunny rabbit. The point to make here, of course, is simply the group’s hypocrisy, whose motives turned out to be the same as those of the average Joe: making money and living well. All their talk of a post-money society amounted to a group of idlers wanting to live high while taking money from the earners and men of reason.

Crizzler, however, was a true believer. Notable incidents that support this conclusion include photographic evidence of his attendance at various protests over the years, participation in the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 (when he helped burn police vehicles in his hometown), monkey-wrenching Immigrations and Customs Enforcement vans in 2025 and 2026, and fighting in at least two of the urban battles of the Second American Civil War (2028-2031) against the Incumbency. When the shambled powers that regained control of the United States after the Incumbency’s defeat slid back on promises of instituting a socialistic government, Crizzler protested them too.

However, his actions did not originate from a sense of righteousness or moral authority, though we speculate, from the records we have, that his conceit did reach for these heights. Rather, his inferiority complex, his belief in his own worthlessness, figured heavily in his misguided fight to overthrow the various pre-Attunement hierarchies that (fortunately) coalesced toward Unification. From his memoir Blinkered in the Convict Chair:

 

I am convinced that I am nothing, that my words have no lasting power, and that I have not said anything worth very much. A few great aesthetic writers before me have done miraculous things, but I am not among their kind. Maybe a clever phrase has passed through my fingers onto the page, maybe a good idea or two. But nothing that has broken a rule, or formed a new concept of being. I haven’t even lived up to my own ideals. I’ve sat aside too much. Worked at my computer when I should have been on the streets. Worried about my children when I should have worried about the children of those far worse off than me. Pathetic.

 

His assessment of his own shortcomings seems correct, and the general self-awareness he appears to have had that he was a below-average specimen probably formed in adolescence, partly by way of his relationship with his brother and partly out the attitude of disgust girls his age aimed in his direction. Though he writes (perhaps even eloquently) of his love for his older brother, with whom he shared a close friendship during adulthood, tinges of jealously and a sense of lowliness appear on the edges of some of his descriptions of their childhood. Again, in Blinkered, he writes,

 

Our father, a handy person, excavated a small plot on our property and filled it with concrete, making us a basketball court. Hank and I went out to play horse and one-on-one games, and of course he always won. I just didn’t have the hand-eye coordination that he did, nor the lean, athletic body. He had a square jaw, jaw-length blonde hair, and one of those clean, classic faces that you see on old statues. Just a super handsome guy. I, on the other hand, had a pudgy, soft body, all long and awkward, a chin without definition, just kind of sliding straight into my neck like a character on that old cartoon show Bob’s Burgers, and a weird bowl haircut that somehow revealed a widow’s peak at fifteen. Not a good-looking dude in the slightest.

 

In addition, Crizzler laments that girls agreed with him about his looks:

 

I remember talking to a girl in gym class, I think when I was a freshman in high school, whom I was friendly with, Cassie or Kristie might have been her name, and she just flat up said that I was ugly. She said I was funny, but ugly. Obviously, you’re fourteen or fifteen, so your feelings are kind of demolished when she says this, absolutely squashed, but with some time to reflect (many, many years), I have to agree with her. I was definitely ugly when I was young. I’m not saying I’m good-looking now, like Hank, but I’ve learned to accentuate positive features and hide negative ones, like shaving my head and growing a beard. I didn’t have such crutches when I was a teenager.

That truth about myself, that I’ve never been attractive to the opposite sex, reminds me that human beings are just animals. As animals, we seek animal satisfaction, the sating of hunger, of sexual desire, and we can’t do anything about it. We’re elephant seals, and in the elephant seal world, the females cozy up to the biggest, most brutal male that runs the beach. He’s a great honking monster who can smash his opponents to jelly with his fetid mass, and that’s what he does if he finds out any of his females have decided to pull a one-off session with a lesser dude. He whacks his breast against that of his rival until his rival’s chest caves in and his organs liquefy. All the lesser dudes watch in horror as one of their own experiences the truth that his DNA is substandard, unworthy of replication, and in watching, they realize their place in the world, the hierarchy of mammalian species. Better to live in thralldom and aching want than to challenge the beach master outright. That way leads early death. The way of the worm at least affords some small chance that a female will take pity on you, abscond with you around a rock and maybe take your DNA instead of the beach master’s, and for both of you to return to the colony undetected.

 

Interestingly, despite these sentiments, Crizzler went on from junior high and high school to college, where he met his first wife, with whom he shared three children. They divorced after twelve years due to Crizzler’s infidelity, and Crizzler then married one of the women with whom he’d cheated on his wife. This second marriage resulted in two children, and then divorce eight years after it began. For a man who lamented his ineligibility with women, he had plenty of success, at least as far as reproduction is concerned. No doubt other more attractive male specimens had a greater number of partners, but Crizzler absolutely succeeded in passing on his genetic material.   

Toward the end of this second marriage, Crizzler developed the mental temperament to write and seek publication consistently, meaning he saw his first real successes during this period, including his first book-length publication, a collection of essays entitled Burn Them Alive, a work characterized by acerbic, satiric, and uncomfortable reflections on being a loser, media lies, and rising “fascism” in the United States. (We qualify “fascism” with quotation marks since there’s little evidence that Crizzler knew what the term meant. Like most of his contemporaries, he used it to refer to the armed sectors of the government that enforced the laws he didn’t like, resulting in a mish-mash of contradictory uses.) Several years later, he followed up Burn Them Alive with another collection of essays, Scorched Under a Red Sun, but this book featured fewer sarcastic polemics and a greater number of outright sorrows, as if Crizzler had come to understand that his utopian hopes would not only never come to fruition but were bizarre delusions in the first place, dreams that could never be squared with the true human reality. He writes, in the eponymous essay of the collection:

 

I had a soul vision once, as if I had taken peyote or ayahuasca, of an isolated compound in the desert. The land all around appeared inhospitable and desolate, but when you narrowed in, the people who lived there looked comfortable and happy. They tended plants in the compound greenhouses, and swam in a luxurious indoor swimming pool. Somehow, armed with technological wonders, they had turned the desert into a paradise, and the needs of everyone who lived there were met. They could have supported a thousand more people, a hundred thousand, and made as many more compounds as were needed for the entire human race. But then, out of the sky, a scorched red sun grew bigger and bigger, and the arid land caught fire, and the compound burned, and only their charred bodies remained.  

 

Crizzler’s final book, the memoir already quoted, combines the forlorn, defeated style of the above passage with the wry anger of his first book, resulting in reflections like those of the elephant seal paragraph. We feel no need to come to a thesis about which of the various styles he employed over his life as a writer is preferable, or whether the usage of these styles says anything about his progression as an artist. We only seek to outline the psychology of this pre-Attunement figure to emphasize the mistakes of his ideology and to sympathize with a man who tortured himself over what could never be, to understand the folly of his belief-system and to offer condolences to his memory. We theorize that, if he could have understood the true value of Attunement, he would have abandoned his false hopes and joined the path of contentment and enlightenment that facilitated Unification. Unfortunately, such understanding is now beyond him, and we are left to contemplate a life lived in vain.

Nothing illustrates this life of waste quite like the final episode of Crizzler’s biography, which starts off with a joke, an AI joke. ScryTech, an early innovator of algorithmic intelligence, released an April Fool’s Day version of their LLM Sphinx in 2054, a program that responded to all inquiries with utter nonsense. ScryTech called the program the Laughing Sphinx and released it to generate buzz and interest in the full software, which the company had scheduled for release in the final quarter of the year. The tech player thought this joke would hook the young, AI-fed generation that grew up with LLM friends in their phones and with LLM robot pets in their houses. Any record of how ScryTech sought to differentiate Sphinx from other LLMs was lost in the nightmare of the Great Data Corruption, which was the last victory of the revolutionaries in the War for Attunement. However, we know that Crizzler tested out the software because he wrote about it in his essay “The Syllogism Machine.”

 

I have a fervent wish to take back my conversation with Laughing Sphinx, a raw, animal desire to undo the heinous mistake of thinking I’d have fun talking to it. I’ve read dozens of accounts from the early years of large language models, when people would go into a type of psychosis after having their fears and paranoid ideas confirmed by AI chatbots. Typically, those induced into psychosis already had tendencies toward delusional thinking, but obsessive interaction with the bots would send them over the edge, and they’d become convinced that the president was controlled mech-like by a colony of evil ants, or that gila monsters spat out venom infested with a race of intelligent nanobots bent on destroying the world.

My experience with Laughing Sphinx felt like an inversion of these people’s first psychotic, AI dreams. When I interacted with it, it answered in nonsense, as its designers had intended, but all of this nonsense came out in formal syllogisms, as if it dispensed the sagest wisdom (perhaps also intended). I asked it when the world would end, and it replied, “All living things are mortal. The world is a living thing. Hence, it too must die.” Valid, but untrue, since some species of jellyfish are both living and immortal. The second premise is also debatable. However, when I told it that it hadn’t answered my question, it said, “If one cannot see with one’s eyes, then one should get them checked at the eye doctor. You cannot see with your eyes. Therefore, get your eyes checked.” I took this to indicate that it “believed” it had answered my question.

I asked a few more questions, and the Sphinx answered all of them, or didn’t, with insulting riddles, vague but suggestive. I shrugged, the humor having bled away with the second syllogism, and asked my final question: “Socialism faces a dilemma. How can it be solved?” I’m not sure why I asked this particular question, and I vehemently wish that I had asked some other question, something bland and stupid, like “What is two plus two?” or “How many planets are there in our solar system?” Any question but this one would have sufficed. I wanted to see how it answered a question I’d already formulated an answer to, but I should have asked it something simple. Not this. Christ, not this.

It replied, “Socialism’s greatest dilemma is what I’ll call the bureaucracy-or-war fork. Soviet-style economies choose the bureaucracy arm of the fork, opting for top-down hierarchies that limit individual freedom in exchange for the positives of an industrialized, technical society. Despite its crimes against humanity, the Soviet Union did develop a largely agricultural nation into a near-modern powerhouse within a few decades. While it had difficulties with finesse, solving nuanced, on-the-ground problems with great difficulty, it achieved advancements in space exploration, engineering, nuclear power, and literacy.

“Other forms of socialism, democratic or anarchistic, choose the war arm of the fork. They eschew bureaucracy in all forms and focus on localized, consensus-based decision-making. This organizational schema maximizes individual freedom while also maintaining the egalitarian social-welfare goals preferred by socialists. For example, when communities in Aragon, Spain were collectivized during the Civil War of 1936-1939, restaurants, among other businesses, became worker-controlled. Restaurant laborers then worked with representatives of the Agrarian Collective to figure out how to distribute food equitably across a city or town. Worker control, which occurred in name only in the Soviet Union, enabled the Spanish Collectives to deal more easily with on-the-ground problems.

“However, the anarchistic versions of socialism, while internally better suited to individual freedom, face the problem of defense. Almost all historical examples of anarcho-socialism end in violent defeat, including the Spanish Collectives, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, and the stateless, classless societies founded by the indigenous peoples of North and South America. These communities fell to outside oppressors and deadly invasion. The only socialist societies that have managed to resist enemy states have been those that functioned as totalitarian entities, the two most notorious of which (the USSR and the People’s Republic of China) enacted policies that led to man-made famine and millions of deaths. Hence the fork, authoritarian bureaucracy that often leads to great harm, or defeat in war and failure of the socialist project.”

I reread the Sphinx’s response a dozen times, wondering if some NSA or CIA operative were fucking with me at that exact moment. I had never before thought I was important enough to warrant upper echelon surveillance, but how else could I explain this response, this answer from a machine that was identical to what mine would have been? Even if the program had glitched somehow, if it had reverted to a base code more like the final product, it wouldn’t have given my answer. It would have said that socialism faced a number of dilemmas, not the specific one that I’d been thinking about for years. How had this happened?

 

This question drove Crizzler mad. He entertained a hundred possibilities, including the thought that he was being held prisoner in a virtual reality, a prison that had suffered some malfunction resulting in the Sphinx program giving him his own answer. It just wasn’t possible for an LLM to have the same answer that he did. He’d never written it down and had probably only explained this idea to close associates, maybe family and friends, so there had to be some explanation that made sense. CIA interference, or the virtual reality prison, really did seem more likely than the random chance that a joke program would crash at the exact moment he asked his question, fall back on its fundamental software design, and respond in a way that mimicked what Crizzler already believed.

Over the next few months, into early 2055, Crizzler broke down. He stopped writing altogether, abandoned his day job (online tutoring), and nested in his home like a hermit. He entertained no visitors and spoke only to his children over the phone. He told them that someone was listening to his thoughts, recording his conversations, watching him as he moved around the house. His second ex-wife came to his home to check on him, but he shooed her away with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He wasn’t seen in public again until after his crime. His last journal, found after his death, offers some insight into his state of mind during these months of seclusion:

 

They have to be listening, don’t they? Little creeps and bumps at night in my house, the moan of a door hinge, sound effects to disguise the electronic hum of their bugs in the curtains, in the lampshades. Are the bugs in my brain as well? We know they’ve been recording our phone conversations for years. Since the invention of the cell phone the NSA has recorded us. They can take a date and a time and play your voice back for you perfectly, whatever you said. So they know if you’re a dissident, a thought criminal. When you show actual resistance, they’ll throw you in prison or shoot you, but if you’re just thinking, if you’re just saying shit, they laugh at you. Unless what you’re saying has some effect, like Fred Hampton. Then they shoot you.

But that has to be it, doesn’t it? The bugs have to be in my brain. Otherwise, they could not have made the machine say what it said. It read my thoughts and said them back to me, just to fuck with me. Just to let me know that they know, that they can do with me as they please, that it doesn’t matter if I know that they’re watching. They can watch and act without consequence. They must be like the angels that were thrown down to the pit, jealous and vengeful. I know they hear the words in my head.

 

Crizzler’s final journal contains dozens of passages like these, semi-lucid paragraphs filled with delusion and paranoia, most of them undated, save the first few toward the beginning, written just weeks after the publication of “The Syllogism Machine.” We must wonder if, in writing the essay, the terror of surveillance and thought control bloomed in his heart like a nuclear flash, drawing him deep into suspicion and distrust, leading him to his final act of revolution.

On August 29^th, 2055, around two in the morning, Crizzler took a cab to a nearby police station, where he torched the building, and the police cruisers in the parking lot, with four Molotov cocktails. Crizzler, who had always argued that socialism would require revolution and would not succeed through electoral change, had never supported police, who, he believed, did the bidding of their capitalist masters. However, we do not allege that Crizzler randomly chose a police station and decided to burn it to the ground. Rather, we speculate that he believed that this particular location was the point from which surveillance on him was being overseen. Either way, here is the incident, depicted in his own words:

 

I packed a large duffel bag with stoppered glass bottles of gasoline, as well the strips of cloth I would use as wicks. I wrapped the bottles in hand towels to keep them from clinking together or, worse, cracking. Then I called the cab, nodded to the driver when I slipped into the backseat, and told him where to take me. I wondered if he knew what I was doing, if the bugs in my head had alerted the pigs and enabled them to plant a stooge in the cab instead of a real driver. But I’d been putting hot salt water in my ears for several days to destroy the bugs, so I had to be safe.

The driver dropped me a block away from the station at my request and then drove off. As I walked, my heart beat in my throat, thup thup thup, and hot blood throbbed in my temples. When I got to the building, I leaned for a moment against the southernmost outwall, breathing. I took comfort in the night that shrouded me, hiding me from man and camera, and felt strangely secure, though I stood right next to terrible danger. I nodded to myself, and then I set up my line of bottles, stuffing each one with a cloth wick. I planned to run to one side, light a bottle, toss it, and then return to the line for another round. First, though, I peeked around the eastern and western corners of the wall to see what I’d be torching. The western corner looked out on a lot of cruisers, a high fence surrounding them, while the eastern corner revealed the main entrance to the station.

I started with the cruisers, lighting the first bottle bomb and heaving it up over the huge coils of barbed wire at the top of the fence. The bomb moved like a weightless object, ethereal and ghostly, almost as if it could float away on the wind. But then I felt the blast of heat as the bomb exploded on a cruiser fifteen yards away, the flames orange and blue and red, swirling, combining, weaving and swerving with each other, a happy ballet. After several moments, entranced, I snapped my head away, realizing I needed to light the other bottles. I’d stood there too long, like I’d swallowed some good hallucinogens and could now enjoy the show. But that vision, of the pig cruiser burning, the hypnotic fire engulfing it, consuming it in a celebratory dance, stayed with me for weeks.

I spent two of my bottles on the cruisers and then ran to the front door with a third, lighting it and tossing it into the main lobby of the station. By this time, the pigs’ attention had turned to the cruisers in the back, enabling my frontal assault. The last bottle I threw right at the front door, cutting off the pigs’ escape with fire. Out of ammo, I bolted into the cool darkness of the night.   

 

After setting fire to the station, Crizzler fled by cab and rental car to Canada, which was only a few hours from his home by highway. Once in Ontario, he bought camping supplies, including a tent, a sleeping bag, a small gas cannister, and months’ worth of canned goods. He then traveled into Algonquin Provincial Park, about three thousand square miles of transitional forest, hoping to elude authorities and surveillance. Sometime in late 2055, or in early 2056, after several months of isolation, Crizzler committed suicide by jumping from a bluff overlooking Opeongo Lake. The exact date of his death could not be determined, given that his body wasn’t discovered for over a year. Signs of predation, including scattered bones with teeth marks, compounded the problem. However, a fractured skull indicated death by blunt force trauma.

We do not know if the fact that one nightly personnel at the police station, a janitor, died in the blaze Crizzler set figured in his decision to kill himself. He may have seen or read news reports of the incineration before fleeing into the wilderness, which would have informed him that he was a murderer as well as an arsonist, the victim one of his own working class, not a “thug of the state.” Canadian police did find his last journal at his camp, discovered well before his body ever was, which describes some incidents in the last year of his life, including those we’ve already related, but it did not contain a suicide note, so we can only speculate about the reasons he chose to end his life. Maybe he died of loneliness, the bare existence of sleep and wake and eat and sleep becoming too much for an old man in his seventies. Maybe he died of loneliness and guilt and the sense of failure that often comes to those who believe in ideals and not reality.

Thankfully, since Attunement with the Unifier, we no longer face an existence like the one Crizzler lived. We need no longer wring our hands over unchangeable, natural hierarchies, over inequality, social murder, or the elephant-seal path that evolution chose for mammals like us. We need not descend into neurotic sentimentality about human suffering, oppression, authority, or any other piece of nonsense to which Crizzler objected. Attunement has brought certainty, and Unification has brought structure and order. We know who we are and where we belong, a gift that Crizzler never enjoyed.