LOSING FAITH IN GOD in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the West dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. During the early years of my faithlessness, I read a lot of existentialist novels, filling their margins with empathetic exclamation points. “It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but I merely imagine I exist,” muses the protagonist of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. “The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality.” When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread — an anxiety that would appear without warning and expressed itself most frequently on the landscape of my body. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I’d lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse — drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate — were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined. To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It’s not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical with it.

Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient. Within months of encountering Kurzweil, I became totally immersed in transhumanist philosophy. By this point, it was early December and the days had grown dark. The city was besieged by a series of early winter storms, and snow piled up on the windowsills, silencing the noise outside. I increasingly spent my afternoons at the public library, researching things like nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.

I’VE SINCE HAD TO DISTANCE MYSELF from prolonged meditation on these topics. People who once believed, I’ve been told, are prone to recidivism. Over the past decade, as transhumanism has become the premise of Hollywood blockbusters and a passable topic of small talk among people under 40, I’ve had to excuse myself from conversations, knowing that any mention of simulation theory or the noosphere can send me spiraling down the gullet of that techno-theological rabbit hole.

This is not to say that I have outgrown those elemental desires that drew me to transhumanism — just that they express themselves in more conventional ways. Over the intervening years, I have given up alcohol, drugs, sugar, and bread. On any given week, my Google search history is a compendium of cleanse recipes, HIIT workouts, and the glycemic index of various exotic fruits. I spend my evenings in the concrete and cavernous halls of a university athletic center, rowing across virtual rivers and cycling up virtual hills, guided by the voice of my virtual trainer, Jessica, who came with an app that I bought. It’s easy enough to justify these rituals of health optimization as more than mere vanity, especially when we’re so frequently told that physical health determines our mental and emotional well-being. But if I’m honest with myself, these pursuits have less to do with achieving a static state of well-being than with the thrill of possibility that lies at the root of all self-improvement: the delusion that you are climbing an endless ladder of upgrades and solutions. The fact that I am aware of this delusion has not weakened its power over me. Even as I understand the futility of the pursuit, I persist in an almost mystical belief that I can, through concerted effort, feel better each year than the last, as though the trajectory of my life led toward not the abyss but some pinnacle of total achievement and solution, at which point I will dissolve into pure energy. Still, maintaining this delusion requires a kind of willful vigilance that can be exhausting.

[...] the people who invented the story didn’t have modernity. They didn’t have ruffled caps or gingham aprons or a notion of quaintness to which these garments belonged. And they presumably did not have a concept of the wilderness, not the way we do. We think of the wilderness as bounded and finite. For them, it was the matrix in which everything else took place, the default, always ready to reclaim its territory. What did it feel like to tell this story about a wild beast when the wilderness pressed so close? What did it look like, in their heads? If you take away the cozy familiarity of that image — a wolf impersonating a grandmother — what are you looking at?

In order for the Männerbünde to do its work, it was necessary to turn boys into wolves. We don’t even know, we cannot and will not name, what we are creating when we somehow transform boys into people who have lost the moral intuition that a woman’s body belongs to the woman — who don’t suspect that a woman’s body is not like a piece of furniture on the curb, not something that belongs to whoever can lift it. We don’t know what this means, this absolute objectification that cannot, logically, be just a vile anomaly in an ethical system otherwise egalitarian and humane. We don’t know what these crimes mean, these assaults that could not occur so regularly, so predictably, were it not the case that all the players are playing to the edge, not just the small percentage who actually cross the line and rape. We don’t know what work this institution performs — this institution of American alpha-bros, of jocks, frat guys, popular dudes, these tight-knit cliques of privileged and socially dominant young men — and we don’t know what bargain we have struck, and strike every day, when we permit this institution to exist in a status quo that appears impervious to growing scrutiny and serial outcries and ever-increasing awareness of “incapacitation rape,” this so often bloodless and invisible violence. There is, as yet, nothing and no one to make us know it, nothing to make it public knowledge, knowledge that we all share and that we all acknowledge that we share. To create that kind of knowledge, you must have more power than whatever forces are working to maintain oblivion. [...]

THIS IS THE STORY I’VE COME UP WITH, about the story Jackie told: she did it out of rage. She had no idea she was enraged, but she was. Something had happened, and she wanted to tell other people, so that they would know what happened and know how she felt. But when she tried to tell it — maybe to somebody else, maybe to herself — the story had no power. It didn’t sound, in the telling, anything like what it felt like in the living. It sounded ordinary, mundane, eminently forgettable, like a million things that had happened to a million other women — but that wasn’t what it felt like to her. What it felt like was lurid and strange and violent and violating. I have no idea what it was, whether a crime was involved. There’s a perfectly legal thing called hogging, where guys deliberately seek out sex partners they find unattractive so they can laugh about it later with their friends. Maybe it was something like that, or maybe it was much milder, an expression of contempt that was avuncular, unthinking, something that transformed her into a thing without even meaning to. Whatever it was, this proximate cause, she didn’t know what to do about it. To figure out how to go on from that moment without dying from rage, you need something she didn’t have. You need self-insight, or historical insight, or at the very least a certain amount of critical distance, a wry appreciation of the ironies of it all. She didn’t have any of that, and that’s why she lied, knowingly or unknowingly — or, most likely, both at once.

The view of the golf course from the deck of my borrowed McMansion is calculated to hit the pleasure center of every human brain: a still pool of water framed by an undulating ribbon of greenery. Above the fairway, the desert mountains rise like great heaps of bone and ash that have been welded together by the sun.

Returning here at night, the sameness of the darkened houses conveys an anxiety about being different in some small but decisive way that will catapult you and your children out of the realm of golf courses and throw pillows and back into the world of gardeners and maids you came from, a recurring horror that can be hidden from children and spouses with pills, but always returns a few days or weeks later — which is why the kids liked rock and roll. It promised relief from the sound of anxious seconds ticking away, a promise of obliteration and being in the same moment. Standing next to an amp and feeling a thrill when someone touched a string.

People have always worked to produce useful things. But under capitalism, labor becomes the basis of all social relationships. Marx tried to describe this novelty with his distinction between abstract and concrete labor. In every kind of society, people perform concrete labor — for example, turning a piece of leather into a shoe. In a capitalist economy, people also work in order to acquire the products of other people’s labor. The shoemaker makes shoes so that he can buy a car, produced by autoworkers he will never meet. This form of social organization — in which workers essentially trade their labor — requires that every form of concrete labor be measurable according to a common metric, as if all were products of “abstract labor,” or labor as such. For Marx, this metric is labor time. Workers receive an hourly wage, which they use to buy products whose prices reflect labor costs. Firms compete over the relative cost of their products, forcing them to minimize labor costs and maximize productivity. Society as a whole comes to be organized around the production of value generally, not specific use-values to satisfy specific human needs, and the labor process is constantly reshaped and degraded by the imperative to produce efficiently. Given this reading, socialism would be not a giant factory, but a world where wealth and value no longer took the form of congealed labor time. (The positive form it would take has never been clear.) Here, Endnotes found a German rhyme for the French ultraleft position that workers need to leave the workplace, not seize it.