An Efilist Just Bombed a Fertility Clinic. Was This Bound to Happen?

Summary

On Saturday morning, a parked SUV exploded outside the American Reproductive Centers fertility clinic, killing its driver and wounding at least four bystanders. Federal agents branded the blast an act of terrorism aimed at in-vitro fertilization. Shortly after, a bare-bones website—promortalism.com—surfaced, where the bomber, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, condemned “the disease of life,” and urged visitors to mirror and share “the recorded stream of my suicide & bombing” before censors intervened.Bartkus’s rhetoric will be familiar to not only anyone who’s followed my reporting on efilism and promortalism, but anyone who has watched the strange after-life of utilitarianism (and early heterodox YouTube debate culture) on the Internet unfold. What you see in efilism is something you see across the web—a distinct style of moral bookkeeping. Effective Altruists have shrimp welfare. Silicon Valley’s Rationalists and other AI doomers extend the same habit to AI: if an unfriendly super-intelligence might one day turn the universe into paperclips, as Nick Bostrom’s 2003 thought experiment warned, then every present choice must be tallied against that cosmic risk. It’s unusual, occasionally antisocial, and can take us to some very dark places.(Because I’m Falling Asleep But Understand the Urgency of Publishing This Now)In 2006 the South African philosopher David Benatar published Better Never to Have Been, arguing that existence itself is harm, because, according to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of pleasure matters only to someone forced to miss it. His book supplied the term antinatalism and the asymmetrical equation that sustains it: Benatar’s argument drifted onto early YouTube—in a swamp of heterodox debating, particularly centered around New Atheism—where a user called DerivedEnergy posted a two-part “Defense of Antinatalism,” inviting other YouTubers to debate him, back when people made reply videos. More radical voices soon arrived. To ma...