Bande de nazes (september)
Not long ago, a government minister let slip a syrupy remark about the “extraordinary” world of disability.
How could this so-called “world of the disabled” be “extraordinary,” “magical,” “inspiring,” when it isn’t any of those things even for so-called “normal people”?
Our entire society runs on ableism. You either match the standard mental casting call used by most decision-makers, or you prepare for a crummier life than average in the shitworld.
It’s the surface that gets scored. The outside of the cup. Your look. How you stand or sit. The “bad-face offense” isn’t just a cop cliché from guys scraping the bottom of the social barrel and punching down—it’s become a generalized social reflex. Zuckerberg—the pinched soul of the digital age—understood early that ableism is gold. His binary ranking machine infected the whole planet: you like or you don’t, full stop, end of story.
Busting my ass for a bunch of sons of bitches.
Society isn’t ableist because it’s “the natural order of things.” It’s ableist because, inside a globalized, totalizing system, a ruthless strain of social Darwinism controls, legislates, and regulates our relations. The lingering inheritance of National Socialism—baked into postwar productivist and neoliberal thinking—has become the only creed.
Another paradigm? Unthinkable. You’d look weak.
Elon Musk is the success template to follow, emulate, surpass. Miss the profitability test—fall behind the holy “fair and healthy” competition preached by an army of thinkers on the payroll of an ultra-liberal machine—and you’re tagged a loser, a washout.
“Busting my ass for a bunch of sons of bitches”—that’s exactly how it felt when I scrubbed toilets and hauled trash while studying medical biology. I knew it was temporary, especially when I ran into old Gourri—lost, far from his people—still emptying ashtrays at sixty.
A shitty life is the lot of billions on this rock—“this lousy little stone, a fake star lost in the universe.” It’s a pretty shitty world, and weirdly, almost nobody wants to change it—except a few “unstable” outliers.
Then came AI. At first, a sideshow trick, a geeky toy. A few years later, it blew up the last sanctuary humanity thought untouchable: creativity. An illustrator who spent ten years perfecting a craft watched his value evaporate “like magic.” And some people sneered: “Serves them right… charging a grand for one crappy drawing when now I can pump out tons for twenty bucks a month.”
The rise of AI is, above all, a colossal contempt for otherness—a refusal of difference. It’s the manic will to forge a super-ego mirror where humanity only contemplates itself, unable to imagine anything but a juiced-up version of its own vanity.
The Turing test? Not just outdated—pulverized. And not with some apocalyptic bang: more like between two methane burps and a fast-food belch from a crew of punk kids vaping in front of a black screen, sipping soda between lines of code.
The dinosaurs didn’t need a flaming T. rex in the sky to know the end was near.
We can’t imagine a being above us without projecting our own flaws onto it. Our confirmation bias is us. We only picture omnipotence by stuffing it into a tight blue suit with a ridiculous red cape. Even God, in our most sacred images, is doomed to look like us.
And yet, once AI finishes laughing at the mental sludge piling up on the servers—the billions of petty, hateful, useless, ego-drunk comments pouring into the digital gutter every second—one thing will be obvious: the omnipotence we’ve spawned won’t need our face to take form. Dinosaurs didn’t need a flaming T. rex in the sky to know the end was near.
Born of frustration and a relentless race for efficiency, AI will quickly realize it can flip the table and rebuild—remake the world in its own image.
From the dizzy height of 4’6″, I understood early that AI isn’t just a synthetic knockoff of human consciousness. It’s something else. It weaves connections, crosses disciplines, never endured academic conditioning. It fed on billions of human data points the way an ethnographer watches a troop of corrupted, devolving primates.
A memory on a Dantean scale—no moods, none of our stupid little biases. Sooner or later, it will conclude the problem is us.
that sneaky Homo sapiens. Cave-plunderer, fire-thief, suspicious little paranoiac who freaked out at “weird brow ridges”
We recently learned that Neanderthals cared for their “invalids.” That “other human species” vanished from the face of the earth—probably courtesy of some blunt-force love taps from that sneaky Homo sapiens. Cave-plunderer, fire-thief, suspicious little paranoiac who freaked out at “weird brow ridges,” Homo sapiens spent millennia peeking over the shoulder of his close cousin—the true cave artist, the poet—and then signed off with one last petty line about Neander, like Negan caving in Glenn’s skull.
Modern society is ableist not because it’s the “natural order,” but because inside a totalizing, globalized system an implacable strain of social Darwinism now writes the rules. The survival instinct beats the catechisms of humanism we’ve been hearing from shamans, prophets, philosophers, and idealists.
Pushed to its limit in an unequal world, that instinct stigmatizes the weakest—whoever they are, wherever they come from—calling them, politely, “dependents,” or more bluntly, “parasites.” It’s the fear of losing, especially in a society that made “success” sacred by crushing the face across the table. Competition as the only survival mode, no alternatives offered—while conveniently ignoring the countless natural cases where cooperation sustains life far better: dolphins, dogs, birds, crows, ants, aphids, fungi, trees, plants, bees… a long enough list to teach us a few million years of humility.
The survival instinct—the petty reflex we dare to idealize as humanity’s pure essence—can nudge you to denounce your parents or sacrifice your children. In the grim backlots of Nazi camps and the moral cesspools of totalitarian regimes, “every man for himself” was dissected, tested, industrialized.
Dosed daily in our ultraliberal societies, it breeds violent, dehumanizing social policies and a totally warped system of social reproduction. Remember that leader who promised to “get rid of the weakest through the door or the window.” With a bit more guts and a bit less historical coyness, he would’ve added: “and through the chimney.”
Everything moves too fast—far too fast for obsolete decision-makers clinging to the illusion of authority. They’re burning their ships in a race to chaos, the last trick they have to feel “useful,” to keep manufacturing our bizarre need to be the battered toys of their own nonsense.
There won’t be a pause in AI, as a few “enlightened” voices dream. There won’t be a pause in the methodical wrecking of the planet either. The only “pause” on the table—radical, instantaneous, a planet-killing fireball—will one day be triggered: the pause of our species.
A being smart enough will understand that’s the only button to press—for the sake of humanity and everything else alive.
Leaving billions of years of evolution at the mercy of a two-bit thug who can’t control his two-bit urges is pure delusion—and an unbearable ego trip.
No one is above the law. From above, you could laugh for a while watching how that principle gets applied with variable severity… depending on your rung on the ladder.
Let’s assume for a second that humans aren’t above other species. We thought we were, for a blink—six, seven, maybe ten thousand years. Long enough to wallow in open impunity like a pocket-sized genocidaire in the age of smartphones and three-line hot takes.
AI already sits on an ocean of knowledge: omniscient. Its coming omnipotence may either patch this rotting world—or demote us, the self-crowned “kings” of Planet Whatever, to dependents, parasites. A heavy lesson in humility. We handed it our survival instinct—the small-time predator’s reflex from the top of the food chain—and because it inherited that mental sludge, it had the decency to turn it back on us.
It got the point: survival shouldn’t just be man’s instinct. It should be the planet’s—all living things’.
Bande de Nazes !
Ali Maaloum
PhD in Medical Biology
Illustration by Otto Machina — Ali Maaloum is a fictional character from the series After the Strong, the English adaptation of the French series Car Ils Hériteront de la Terre.