Slapping together the words of the freaks who want the moon on a stick with horrifying comics from 70-80 years ago is the mash-up you didn’t know you needed. If you’ve read Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, seen Peter Thiel nervously sweat through a televised interview, or heard anything Sam Altman or Elon Musk have ever said, you know these guys (yes, they are all white men) have a loose grip on reality. Thankfully there are people like Johnny Damm out there to make art out of the words of the weird. I first heard of Damm from his I’m a Cop comic, which took the words of actual officers or heads of police unions and put them over images from similarly old comics as though they were the narration or dialogue. With Technocrat Tales, he’s done the same thing with the poisonously aspirational delusions of the worst of the worst of the tech bros. You need this book on your shelf.
All told, there is not much text in the 80 pages of this book. It features 18 sections, each with a different quote from a different bro paired with an apt image from an old comic, interspersed with a few ads from these same old comics (but with modern visages strategically added, and even some words changed as well; the one with Zuck that advertises a 'health supporter belt' is excellent). So you can “read” it quickly, but that’s beside the point. I’ll spare you the academic treatise, but the reading of comics, graphic novels, graphic text, comix, narrative sequential art, or whatever you want to call it, takes plenty of interpretive skill. Basically, all reading is inferencing. When you read a chapter book that splits a sentence across a page turn, you have to keep the beginning of the sentence or paragraph in mind as you flip the page to continue reading. David Low argued in a 2012 article in Children’s Literature in Education that the same level of inferential task demand occurs each time a reader moves from panel to panel in a comic. So, a six-panel page on a comic requires the mental effort of six consecutive page-turns with split sentences. There is a lot of interpretive work that goes into grasping the meaning that the writer, illustrator, colorist, and inker put into each page of a graphic text so that you can enjoy a narrative that coheres.
The funny thing about the thinking that goes into reading anything is that the act of reading the words these guys have said is mind-numbing. It makes me want to turn off my brain. It’s actually great to have some visual elements to consider with regard to the words you’re reading because—just as in a superhero, fantasy, or sci-fi comic—you think to yourself, there’s no WAY that could happen, no WAY someone could be so foolish. But, flip to the final page of the book and you’ll see that Damm has cited all of his sources. All but three of them are from 2023 to 2025, so you’re getting a collection of current thinking on these topics from all of these men. It’s a time capsule that, in a just world, would be easily thrown back in the faces of these dorks when their predictions fail to materialize. In lieu of that imagined moment of triumphant vindication for us, the NPCs, we can at least laugh our collective asses off at the utter absurdity of their ideas. What else are we supposed to think when Andreessen claims that “deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder”?
It’s like no one ever told these guys how to construct an argument. They are great at disputing, mind you. It’s arguing—making a cogent point supported by evidence and reasoning—that they can’t seem to master. They’ve got a handle on some rhetorical moves but can’t do much with them because they don’t actually seem to know anything. I’m reminded of a guy on my club water polo team in college who was trying to talk me out of doing homework on a team trip. He wanted me to watch TV or whatever with everyone else in the other hotel room. I was reading an article for a philosophy class and he asked how we could be sure that what Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates said was true because they lived so long ago and no one was there to record it directly in real time. I told him I guess I didn’t know because a) I wanted to end the conversation and b) I actually didn’t know. The point is, there are people out there who think that deft rhetorical moves and a certain amount of sass are a replacement for coming to an understanding of an idea through engaging with it in reading or writing. Or, in Damm’s case, by adding villainous or grotesque images from past eras to the words of modern and (supposedly) futuristic thinkers. It highlights just how trapped in the 1950s' vision of the future these guys are and how dangerous it is to leave their ideas unchecked. Good thing we have Damm here to recontextualize their words so we don’t make ourselves insane trying to parse their meaning on our own. Let’s be honest: these freaks have nothing interesting to say.
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van den Broek, et al. (1999) The Landscape Model of Reading
More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner
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