A billionaire tech entrepreneur recently bothered the psychoanalysts by exclaiming on a televised interview that introspection was a 20th century mistake, that it was Viennese, and essentially useless, bad for business and bad for the home, and that he, the tech-entrepreneur, whose large, bald, egg-shaped head leaned away from his compacted face, never gave any thought to his interiority, nor his past, and that he valued above all, unthinking, uncritical action. Go, don’t look back, just go. Like the man who invented Walmart who did not waste time in introspection, but who just made more Walmarts. Why spend time thinking when the market does it for you? The algorithm is god and now we can just outsource cognition to the data center; price action tells us if we are correct or not. Human culture is literally worthless except when it proceeds upwards and to the right. Following a public outcry from those persons who still value mental-life, the tech entrepreneur doubled down on twitter: no important person in history ever thought about anything; and which produced a flurry of think-pieces and editorials listing a long history of important persons who did, in fact, engage in long bouts of introspection, like Socrates, St. Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and so on, deep thinkers all, but whose thoughts have now all been ground up and pulped by AI so that you, conveniently, will never have to remember them or their introspections ever again.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1994
