The A.I. Monarchy(substack.com)
substack.com
The A.I. Monarchy
https://substack.com/home/post/p-156886169
276 comments
We've seen down that road. We know where it leads. Look at the imagined futures of games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. This way lies an extreme dystopia for everyone except the ultra-rich.
Funny that the future Cyberpunk 2077 envisions is IMHO optimistic about AI. Unlike ours, in that world AI has already presented itself as a threat, and worst of them were somewhat successfully contained behind Blackwall. Perhaps because of that and NetWatch, there isn't a strong positive outlook on AI as we have, neither from corporations nor from most people. There are some AI and robots, but they are more specialized and many jobs still require humans, so those who aren't already rich are still to a degree needed. It's a dystopia in many ways, but AI isn't one of them.
None of that has been tested yet in the real world of course. Perhaps we'll manage to build a world that makes Cyberpunk look better. :)
None of that has been tested yet in the real world of course. Perhaps we'll manage to build a world that makes Cyberpunk look better. :)
Uhh… cyberpunk 2077 literally had AI Wars and made a big wall around most of the internet to prevent AI from affecting anyone, except for one taxi company.
Does that sound optimistic?
Does that sound optimistic?
I think parent poster's point is that those AI were independent equal-opportunity menaces, as opposed to tools of powerfulb humans to seize more power.
Optimistic part is that they’ve made it to the other side.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”
- Peter Thiel - The Atlantic 2023"extension of the franchise to women"
Yeah he's been out there in plain sight for a decade plus.
Yeah he's been out there in plain sight for a decade plus.
This guy is such an obstinate dumbass. I’ve never seen a quote from him that didn’t look like a caricature from Silicon Valley.
I don’t think he’s a dumbass. He’s selling pseudo-philosophical guilt-washing to the neo-oligarchs and their temporarily embarrassed billionaire posse, which is a product worth its weight in gold. He hosted the post-election party for all of the trumps, bezoses and Zuckerberg at his estate, so no small player. It’s reminiscent of the growth of the neocon movement – I mean the ideology doesn’t have to be comprehensive or consistent. It just has to be convincing long enough for short sound bites and hot takes, so they can legitimize the rapid transformation of society faster than people have time to refute it.
[deleted]
But they think cyberpunk is really cool!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone embrace cyberpunk aesthetics while misunderstanding its ethos, I'd have enough money to buy my favorite social network and run it into the ground.
But would you have enough to buy your favorite society and run it into the ground?
Re: embracing aesthetics while misunderstanding ethos - I've noticed this about religion too. There is frequently a divide between subscription to deep ethos and social aesthetics and the latter often seems more popular.
This is especially puzzling to me with Christianity considering that a fair bit of the New Testament (and some of the Old) appears to be a criticism of exactly this problem and attempts to transcend it.
It might be that style over substance is a long-running human problem.
Re: embracing aesthetics while misunderstanding ethos - I've noticed this about religion too. There is frequently a divide between subscription to deep ethos and social aesthetics and the latter often seems more popular.
This is especially puzzling to me with Christianity considering that a fair bit of the New Testament (and some of the Old) appears to be a criticism of exactly this problem and attempts to transcend it.
It might be that style over substance is a long-running human problem.
> But would you have enough to buy your favorite society and run it into the ground?
If you pull it off right, you can get a 2-for-1 deal on the social network and parlay the result of your ketamine bender into a role as Shadow President.
If you pull it off right, you can get a 2-for-1 deal on the social network and parlay the result of your ketamine bender into a role as Shadow President.
I’m taking it meta. Not only am I properly embracing high-tech, low-life in game world, my design is of a metaverse preemptively designed to learn the lessons to avoid a corporate dominated abusive version.
> It might be that style over substance is a long-running human problem.
Standardization is useful for scaling.
Standardization is useful for scaling.
Understanding the ethos isn't necessary for reproducing behaviour. Someone has already worked out the why, just do what they tell you do.
Small wonder that the ultra rich who grew up playing these games want to… play these games.
A valid strategy against the monarchist oligarchs is to politely tell the MAGA part of the Republicans that they are being sold out and deceived.
But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message.
If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message.
If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
> If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.
Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues.
With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes.
The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.
Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues.
With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes.
The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
> broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.
As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?
As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?
Isn't it more structural than that? The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run. It's an extremely old and simple way of structuring elections, but the US government has a system that has remained mostly intact for centuries now. We're stuck with it for now. If we wanted this system to be peacefully replaced with something more modern, the parties who benefit from this arrangement would have to be the ones to champion its replacement. That doesn't seem likely.
> Isn't it more structural than that? The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run.
Canada and the UK have first-past-the-post too, yet lack the hard two party system the US has.
One factor is both Canada and the UK have much stronger regional identities than the US - some Americans talk up how strong American regional identities are, but the US has nothing comparable to Scotland or Quebec.
Another factor is the parliamentary system encourages stronger party discipline, which leads to more parties having narrower definitions, compared to the two big tent parties in the US who have such weak party discipline, the party leadership has very little control over its elected officials.
The greater significance of primaries probably also contributes - although in recent decades Canada and the UK have started copying that institution, but still to nowhere near the same degree. A strong primary system weakens a party’s self-control and internal cohesion, and hence promotes it becoming a bigger tent that helps further further entrench the two party system.
Look at the current split of the UK right between Conservatives and Reform - such a split would be far less likely in the US, because the Republican brand is so vague and generic it is much harder for a renegade right wing party to succeed (and the same applies on the left)
> We're stuck with it for now.
One advantage the US has, is electoral systems is mostly a state-level decision, even for federal elections. In most other federations, the voting system used in federal elections is a federal competency. And with 50 states, it only takes one to introduce reforms. But, while there has been some experimentation with alternatives, by and large American states haven’t used their competency to carry out electoral reform. I suspect that is because Americans are fundamentally conservative-in the sense of resistance to change, even self-identified progressives in the US tend to focus their energies on changing certain key issues, and on other issues will let the status quo be.
Canada and the UK have first-past-the-post too, yet lack the hard two party system the US has.
One factor is both Canada and the UK have much stronger regional identities than the US - some Americans talk up how strong American regional identities are, but the US has nothing comparable to Scotland or Quebec.
Another factor is the parliamentary system encourages stronger party discipline, which leads to more parties having narrower definitions, compared to the two big tent parties in the US who have such weak party discipline, the party leadership has very little control over its elected officials.
The greater significance of primaries probably also contributes - although in recent decades Canada and the UK have started copying that institution, but still to nowhere near the same degree. A strong primary system weakens a party’s self-control and internal cohesion, and hence promotes it becoming a bigger tent that helps further further entrench the two party system.
Look at the current split of the UK right between Conservatives and Reform - such a split would be far less likely in the US, because the Republican brand is so vague and generic it is much harder for a renegade right wing party to succeed (and the same applies on the left)
> We're stuck with it for now.
One advantage the US has, is electoral systems is mostly a state-level decision, even for federal elections. In most other federations, the voting system used in federal elections is a federal competency. And with 50 states, it only takes one to introduce reforms. But, while there has been some experimentation with alternatives, by and large American states haven’t used their competency to carry out electoral reform. I suspect that is because Americans are fundamentally conservative-in the sense of resistance to change, even self-identified progressives in the US tend to focus their energies on changing certain key issues, and on other issues will let the status quo be.
> The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run.
And yet the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties. Which demonstrates that they see third parties as a legitimate threat.
And third parties can get enough vote share to tip the outcome ("if only all those people hadn't thrown their votes away, my side would have won!"). Which means they're not the non-entities that theory suggests they are.
And parties aren't static, but have to adjust to match the electorate. There isn't a static steady-state to eventually reach.
And if you've seen discussions about the Democrat party in the US being a "big tent" party that's hamstrung by needing to appease moderates or the Republican party needing to kick out various extremists to gain legitimacy (why yes, most of the discussions I see do come from people on what we call the "left" here, how could you tell?), they sound like there's something similar going on to what I see in discussions about countries with proportional / parliamentary systems having to form coalitions post-election. Ie there's the same sort of coalition-building going on, it just happens before rather than after and isn't explicitly made legible in the labels candidates use for themselves.
And yet the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties. Which demonstrates that they see third parties as a legitimate threat.
And third parties can get enough vote share to tip the outcome ("if only all those people hadn't thrown their votes away, my side would have won!"). Which means they're not the non-entities that theory suggests they are.
And parties aren't static, but have to adjust to match the electorate. There isn't a static steady-state to eventually reach.
And if you've seen discussions about the Democrat party in the US being a "big tent" party that's hamstrung by needing to appease moderates or the Republican party needing to kick out various extremists to gain legitimacy (why yes, most of the discussions I see do come from people on what we call the "left" here, how could you tell?), they sound like there's something similar going on to what I see in discussions about countries with proportional / parliamentary systems having to form coalitions post-election. Ie there's the same sort of coalition-building going on, it just happens before rather than after and isn't explicitly made legible in the labels candidates use for themselves.
> the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties
The spoiler effect means you don’t need collusion to explain the results. Both parties are enormously incentivised to stamp out and subsume ideologically-near competitors. If they don’t, the other party wins.
The spoiler effect means you don’t need collusion to explain the results. Both parties are enormously incentivised to stamp out and subsume ideologically-near competitors. If they don’t, the other party wins.
I don't think it's trite at all. The US electoral system is insane. President is chosen by the same few states every time. I haven't had a vote for president that has mattered ever, and I'm kinda old and have voted in several states.
A wishlist as short as it is improbable:
1. Overturn citizens united. (get money out of politics)
2. Rank-choice voting. (get extremists out of politics)
3. Remove cap on House of Representatives (washington only wanted 1 rep per 30,000 people... we're currently at 1 per 750,000...) (get lack of representation out of politics)
4. Mandatory voting / national holiday.
e.g. at its core, people are not being heard (or even worse, feel like their voice doesn't matter) and vested interests have fully taken the wheel.
1. Overturn citizens united. (get money out of politics)
2. Rank-choice voting. (get extremists out of politics)
3. Remove cap on House of Representatives (washington only wanted 1 rep per 30,000 people... we're currently at 1 per 750,000...) (get lack of representation out of politics)
4. Mandatory voting / national holiday.
e.g. at its core, people are not being heard (or even worse, feel like their voice doesn't matter) and vested interests have fully taken the wheel.
Biden supported our allies while also pressing for a path to peace. Jill Stein had a terrible foreign policy especially with regards to russia. Anyone who thought Trump would do better ...
Inflation had largely been contained, and top including conservative ones economists agreed that Trump's plans were terrible for inflation
Biden was a competent president who brought real positive change.
Harris like Biden actually had a plan for non revolutionary but real gradual change to improve things. Trump promised to destroy stuff(if you actually listed to the meaning of his words) and promised unicorns if you didn't
Inflation had largely been contained, and top including conservative ones economists agreed that Trump's plans were terrible for inflation
Biden was a competent president who brought real positive change.
Harris like Biden actually had a plan for non revolutionary but real gradual change to improve things. Trump promised to destroy stuff(if you actually listed to the meaning of his words) and promised unicorns if you didn't
You can stop campaigning, it's over.
Also, the period where Biden was President may have been competently run (subjective) but Biden himself was not competent when running for re-election so running on his record didn't really work.
Harris wasn't Biden but, despite what VPs say, they don't get much credit (from voters) for their administrations accomplishments. In fact, VPs tend to get the worst assignments (Border Czar) to take the heat off if the President which they usually fail at (because they were set up to).
People saw Harris as the worst part of the previous administration who was selected by committee to be their candidate.
Also, the period where Biden was President may have been competently run (subjective) but Biden himself was not competent when running for re-election so running on his record didn't really work.
Harris wasn't Biden but, despite what VPs say, they don't get much credit (from voters) for their administrations accomplishments. In fact, VPs tend to get the worst assignments (Border Czar) to take the heat off if the President which they usually fail at (because they were set up to).
People saw Harris as the worst part of the previous administration who was selected by committee to be their candidate.
I don’t think you’re invalidating much of what they’ve said and much of what happened.
People bought into far right populism, what’s new ?
People bought into far right populism, what’s new ?
I think I (or attempted to) invalidate everything up to the final paragraph because everything before that was about the Biden presidency which was not positively relevant to the Harris campaign.
Joe Biden's record is Biden's and Harris' responsibilities under the Biden administration was not positive. Let alone questions about her emphatic statements attesting to his mental capacity right up until the emperor had no clothes on national TV.
Unsurprisingly, people were not enthusiastic about being given a candidate who struggled nationally and was widely considered a bad candidate, right up until she was the candidate. Harris is and was a horrible candidate. Everyone knew it, even Democrats.
Democrats spiked the football on fourth down when they were losing with 30 seconds left.
Whatever people want to say about Trump, apparently Democrats didn't find him enough of a threat to democracy to put up a candidate that had a chance to win.
Joe Biden's record is Biden's and Harris' responsibilities under the Biden administration was not positive. Let alone questions about her emphatic statements attesting to his mental capacity right up until the emperor had no clothes on national TV.
Unsurprisingly, people were not enthusiastic about being given a candidate who struggled nationally and was widely considered a bad candidate, right up until she was the candidate. Harris is and was a horrible candidate. Everyone knew it, even Democrats.
Democrats spiked the football on fourth down when they were losing with 30 seconds left.
Whatever people want to say about Trump, apparently Democrats didn't find him enough of a threat to democracy to put up a candidate that had a chance to win.
Democrats put up the only candidate likely to unify the party at that stage. I'm not defending a campaign which lost to Trump. But at some point we also have to blame ourselves and the voting population at large. As well as a media way too forgiving to Trump. How could they vote for something so self evidently self harmful.
The uniparty is absolutely real, but it can be defeated through the exercise of democratic power. To be clear, I don't mean voting. Voting is the thing you do at the end of the democratic process once your power is asserted and coordinated decision-making needs to be done.
What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power. And, most importantly, discussion and coordination, especially among people outside your ideological bubble[0]. This is how you assert your democratic power. Get off social media and make friends[1].
The uniparty thrives on an antisocial politics where the majority of people don't vote, most of each party's voting support is gimmies[2], and elections are decided by inches. That is, when people show up to vote and then just disappear from political life for the next 2 to 4 years. Ironically, the MAGA hats are better at democratic exercises of power, even though the end goal of their thought leaders is to dissolve democracy.
You have to keep in mind that if there's two people in the room, Trump is telling them three different contradictory things. The MAGA coalition is stronger than, say, the "everything's fine" DNC one, but it's still full of contradictions that can't be reconciled. Actually listen to what the MAGA hats are saying - instead of getting into apoplectic fits over the dog whistles they spout - and you can start to spot the cleavages.
Here's some examples of how that could work:
- Do you have a neighbor that works for the government who got that weird Elon Musk fork offer e-mail? Maybe slip them a copy of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
- Are you in a terrible workplace? Get to know your co-workers. Find time to talk with them when the boss isn't watching. Plan shit.
- Take any opportunity you can to get to know people who work in service. Economic stratification and the lack of third spaces mean there are precious few opportunities for the "middle class[3]" and the rest of the working class to socialize and co-mingle.
- If you have family members who have their head in the gaping maw of the MAGA cult, point out the contradictions between what they want and what Trump is doing. Don't try to disprove Trump with facts and logic. Just plant the seed in their minds.
What you want is to build multiple overlapping coalitions of people who are willing to fight for their democratic rights in whatever way they can.
[0] This means hold off on the purity tests. Those are for you, not your friends.
[1] To be clear, I am not ruling out all computer-mediated communication; merely the kind of communication that is designed as a substitute for socialization. This means less political Twitter, Mastodon, or Facebook; and more IRC, SMS, or Discord.
[2] In game design, gimmies are the portion of your score, tokens, or performance, that must be played for, but can safely be assumed to be taken by one player at the start of the game. This would be the person who's voted D or R all their life no matter who or what is running.
[3] "Working class but in denial about it"
What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power. And, most importantly, discussion and coordination, especially among people outside your ideological bubble[0]. This is how you assert your democratic power. Get off social media and make friends[1].
The uniparty thrives on an antisocial politics where the majority of people don't vote, most of each party's voting support is gimmies[2], and elections are decided by inches. That is, when people show up to vote and then just disappear from political life for the next 2 to 4 years. Ironically, the MAGA hats are better at democratic exercises of power, even though the end goal of their thought leaders is to dissolve democracy.
You have to keep in mind that if there's two people in the room, Trump is telling them three different contradictory things. The MAGA coalition is stronger than, say, the "everything's fine" DNC one, but it's still full of contradictions that can't be reconciled. Actually listen to what the MAGA hats are saying - instead of getting into apoplectic fits over the dog whistles they spout - and you can start to spot the cleavages.
Here's some examples of how that could work:
- Do you have a neighbor that works for the government who got that weird Elon Musk fork offer e-mail? Maybe slip them a copy of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
- Are you in a terrible workplace? Get to know your co-workers. Find time to talk with them when the boss isn't watching. Plan shit.
- Take any opportunity you can to get to know people who work in service. Economic stratification and the lack of third spaces mean there are precious few opportunities for the "middle class[3]" and the rest of the working class to socialize and co-mingle.
- If you have family members who have their head in the gaping maw of the MAGA cult, point out the contradictions between what they want and what Trump is doing. Don't try to disprove Trump with facts and logic. Just plant the seed in their minds.
What you want is to build multiple overlapping coalitions of people who are willing to fight for their democratic rights in whatever way they can.
[0] This means hold off on the purity tests. Those are for you, not your friends.
[1] To be clear, I am not ruling out all computer-mediated communication; merely the kind of communication that is designed as a substitute for socialization. This means less political Twitter, Mastodon, or Facebook; and more IRC, SMS, or Discord.
[2] In game design, gimmies are the portion of your score, tokens, or performance, that must be played for, but can safely be assumed to be taken by one player at the start of the game. This would be the person who's voted D or R all their life no matter who or what is running.
[3] "Working class but in denial about it"
> What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power.
Or maybe instead of focusing on destruction, go speak in favor of good policies?
Lying to people that the only way to win is to destroy anyone they perceive as the other team sounds like an excellent way to make sure that everyone loses.
Or maybe instead of focusing on destruction, go speak in favor of good policies?
Lying to people that the only way to win is to destroy anyone they perceive as the other team sounds like an excellent way to make sure that everyone loses.
We've not seen down that road. Fiction isn't reality. Fiction's problems are imagined and exaggerated to give the hero something to overcome.
Dystopian fiction doesn't have a great track record for prediction.
Dystopian fiction doesn't have a great track record for prediction.
Moreover, the vast majority of the callbacks to cyberpunk-- both aspirational and critical-- somehow miss that the entire aesthetic was a response to Reaganomics! Moreover, and somewhat ironically, Reagan was the last US president that used the Heritage Foundation's publications as his policy template.
I wonder what great aesthetic and fiction we'll get from Trumpism?
I wonder what great aesthetic and fiction we'll get from Trumpism?
This network of (almost) city-states existed before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinstaaterei
It was a time of wars and economic turmoil.
It was a time of wars and economic turmoil.
Seriously. Have these guys actually read history?
The small patchwork of kingdoms were always redrawing their borders and sending people to fight over it.
But back then the nobles and kings were expected to at least be present for the fight.
It will not be peace. They will forever try to eat eachother and feed paupers to the war gods while these cowards hide in their luxury bunkers.
The small patchwork of kingdoms were always redrawing their borders and sending people to fight over it.
But back then the nobles and kings were expected to at least be present for the fight.
It will not be peace. They will forever try to eat eachother and feed paupers to the war gods while these cowards hide in their luxury bunkers.
Right now the theory of network states has a built in "Agree or Leave" policy, which I expect if network states actually come from this pitiful Butterfly Revolution will devolve into "Agree or Die." And the 20th century taught us that these sorts of glorious revolutions keep going until the policy is "Agree and Die!" through famines, resource depletion, and counter revolutions
The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.
Further, they still focus on a geographically based monarchy, which is stupid when you could have a federal platform handle the geography issues and evolve the nonessential services to subscriptions provided by any sort of group: multinational, union, church, local community, legacy geographic states and cities, etc.
The focus of any movement from status quo must be in terms of improvement of lives and capacity to handle global challenges, like global warming, space mining and settlement, etc.
The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.
Further, they still focus on a geographically based monarchy, which is stupid when you could have a federal platform handle the geography issues and evolve the nonessential services to subscriptions provided by any sort of group: multinational, union, church, local community, legacy geographic states and cities, etc.
The focus of any movement from status quo must be in terms of improvement of lives and capacity to handle global challenges, like global warming, space mining and settlement, etc.
> The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.
Motivated reasoning makes it difficult for most of us to realise why someone else may call us a mortal enemy (unless we ourselves are severely depressed), and the super-rich are no better.
Outside-the-box thinking is also always difficult. Empires fall when the ruling classes begin to assume the empire's power is the natural order of the world and begin fighting each other to extract wealth from the empire rather than to grow it.
Even to the extent there is historical precident specifically of a threat to business leaders: talk of personal threats to those winning at capitalism has been around continuously since the Communist Manifesto, yet with the fall of the USSR many may think such talk is just talk, that Brian Thompson was a fluke rather than an indicator, etc.
Motivated reasoning makes it difficult for most of us to realise why someone else may call us a mortal enemy (unless we ourselves are severely depressed), and the super-rich are no better.
Outside-the-box thinking is also always difficult. Empires fall when the ruling classes begin to assume the empire's power is the natural order of the world and begin fighting each other to extract wealth from the empire rather than to grow it.
Even to the extent there is historical precident specifically of a threat to business leaders: talk of personal threats to those winning at capitalism has been around continuously since the Communist Manifesto, yet with the fall of the USSR many may think such talk is just talk, that Brian Thompson was a fluke rather than an indicator, etc.
> The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob.
Luigi Mangione aside, hasn't it? Their wealth gets spent on getting the hungry mob to fight amongst themselves about trans rights and abortion and government efficiency and it seems to have been pretty effective because we're no longer talking about taxing the rich and making life better for as many people as possible, instead we're talking about Elon Musk.
No one's storming the terrace at Mar a Lago over the price of eggs.
Luigi Mangione aside, hasn't it? Their wealth gets spent on getting the hungry mob to fight amongst themselves about trans rights and abortion and government efficiency and it seems to have been pretty effective because we're no longer talking about taxing the rich and making life better for as many people as possible, instead we're talking about Elon Musk.
No one's storming the terrace at Mar a Lago over the price of eggs.
There was another, recent incident in which some guy shot a few rounds to a healthcare exec's window in the night...
The funny but tragic thing is why would you even try to do it that way rather than skip past all this nonsense by building a new separate equitable system that is dictator-proof.
Why not literally leave them in the dust, rather than negotiate with terrorists or try to change their mind?
The more they try to push back, the more we'll fix it to be resilient to it, and despite the resources and threats at their disposal we have to realize we actually have more.
Why not literally leave them in the dust, rather than negotiate with terrorists or try to change their mind?
The more they try to push back, the more we'll fix it to be resilient to it, and despite the resources and threats at their disposal we have to realize we actually have more.
What would that look like?
My jaded, knee jerk response was going to be "build a dictator proof system and the world will build a better dictator". I don't want to be hopeless on this so I'm honestly asking about your ideas about it.
My jaded, knee jerk response was going to be "build a dictator proof system and the world will build a better dictator". I don't want to be hopeless on this so I'm honestly asking about your ideas about it.
We need to invest effort into researching how to make quick, high-quality decisions as a collective. Large concentrations of power emerge because we haven't yet discovered how to make effective decisions democratically. Representative democracy is not good enough. We need a robust system of direct democracy capable of producing decisions that are at least as good as those made by a skilled small group.
Innovations like blockchains and LLMs might finally enable us to develop such a system.
Innovations like blockchains and LLMs might finally enable us to develop such a system.
> We need to invest effort into researching how to make quick, high-quality decisions as a collective
Getting rid of First past the post voting systems will reduce incidents of extremism. Ranked choice voting, multiparty systems amd coalition governments would be an improvement on the current American status quo.
Getting rid of First past the post voting systems will reduce incidents of extremism. Ranked choice voting, multiparty systems amd coalition governments would be an improvement on the current American status quo.
None of that prevents extremely wealthy people and organizations from buying enough politicians and media to corrupt the system. Europe has a lot of those things and is struggling with the same issues as the US. We need to either prevent such concentrations of wealth or create a democratic system that money can't corrupt.
Yes this is correct - which is why the crypto infrastructure is just bootstrapping a much more important piece of political infrastructure.
Social Choice Theory begs to differ that we don't understand voting structure in great detail.
> Seriously. Have these guys actually read history?
If you read the work of someone like Yarvin, the answer appears to be: Yes, but selectively. Same with scientific literature. He's very selective in what he reads and how he interprets it. He does not appear to care about the implications of this bias, or register that it exists; his bias is such that it discounts the need to even account for its existence, if that makes sense.
I don't think these people do much reading about things that don't serve them. For lack of a better way to phrase it. I had this revelation while reading into project 2025, Yarvin's work itself, and other, related, periphery works.
I don't like it. I find it very unpleasant. I would rather read something I agree with more, or which feels constructive. I'd like to refine my understanding of history, policy, philosophy, and the rest of the world in ways which I find agreeable and additive to my own beliefs and desires in the world. But I recognize that that's overly self-serving and not conducive to functional, socially-integrated learning and growth. I don't want to bubble myself.
These people don't seem to care. They don't immerse themselves in the nuances of cultures, belief systems, or most plainly perhaps: the reality of people they don't agree with or care about.
The world isn't a complex system of people to them. Everyone else is a distraction or barrier to their desires and preferences. If it isn't functioning to serve them, something is wrong. This is why they all seem to land with this authoritarian stance. They reject everything else. They even want to destroy it.
That has been my take on it, anyway. Many would argue that the people behind Project 2025, the broligarchs, or someone like Yarvin are all far more intelligent than I am. I'm entirely open to that possibility.
If you read the work of someone like Yarvin, the answer appears to be: Yes, but selectively. Same with scientific literature. He's very selective in what he reads and how he interprets it. He does not appear to care about the implications of this bias, or register that it exists; his bias is such that it discounts the need to even account for its existence, if that makes sense.
I don't think these people do much reading about things that don't serve them. For lack of a better way to phrase it. I had this revelation while reading into project 2025, Yarvin's work itself, and other, related, periphery works.
I don't like it. I find it very unpleasant. I would rather read something I agree with more, or which feels constructive. I'd like to refine my understanding of history, policy, philosophy, and the rest of the world in ways which I find agreeable and additive to my own beliefs and desires in the world. But I recognize that that's overly self-serving and not conducive to functional, socially-integrated learning and growth. I don't want to bubble myself.
These people don't seem to care. They don't immerse themselves in the nuances of cultures, belief systems, or most plainly perhaps: the reality of people they don't agree with or care about.
The world isn't a complex system of people to them. Everyone else is a distraction or barrier to their desires and preferences. If it isn't functioning to serve them, something is wrong. This is why they all seem to land with this authoritarian stance. They reject everything else. They even want to destroy it.
That has been my take on it, anyway. Many would argue that the people behind Project 2025, the broligarchs, or someone like Yarvin are all far more intelligent than I am. I'm entirely open to that possibility.
What if they have and it's what they want? If you're a billionaire who already has everything this system can offer, you'd likely desire a system that can give you even more. A system that doesn't limit you in ways that this one does. You'd want to be a king. Even if it means waging war with other kings, it would enable a far more exhilarating life, full of possibilities that don't exist in a system where ordinary people have a say.
I haven't gotten there myself, but I like to think that if I was a billionaire I'd like to see as few ripples as possible in the system that's keeping track of my billions.
And those small kingdoms did not care about oil, minerals back then - things that might not exist in your vicinity, but are required to run a modern economy today.
This entire concept of city-states exists on a premise of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. Given our history, this is pure fiction. (And then these people shit on Communism.)
This entire concept of city-states exists on a premise of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. Given our history, this is pure fiction. (And then these people shit on Communism.)
Of course they did care about minerals. They cared about salt, gold, tin, copper, iron. Also about navigable seaports, sea passages, fertile land, forests, and also workforce. For these resources wars were waged all the time in the Middle ages.
Oil was not as valuable as nowadays, but it was a priced export used as lighting fuel, weapon component for Greek fire, and also as a drug for some health conditions since ~400 BC, and more so later. It was not the central fuel for the economy, but it was considered a valuable resource, though not one for which a war would be started probably.
Oil was not as valuable as nowadays, but it was a priced export used as lighting fuel, weapon component for Greek fire, and also as a drug for some health conditions since ~400 BC, and more so later. It was not the central fuel for the economy, but it was considered a valuable resource, though not one for which a war would be started probably.
You are right. I oversimplified my statement to make the point that the resource requirements of modern economies are more complex. So conflicts happened over less complex resource requirements back then.
Also resources are not just the source materials, but anything within a supply chain, including intermediate products.
This is why the ultra rich now engage in prediction as to which resources will become critical, then try to monopolize that.
> This entire concept of city-states exists on a premise of peaceful coexistence and cooperation
F*ck no. From early Sumerian cities to Greek city-states, they were at each others' throats regularly. You can speak of peaceful cooperation maybe in certain stages of Ancient Egypt, and very early Anatolian settlements like Catalhuyuk.
F*ck no. From early Sumerian cities to Greek city-states, they were at each others' throats regularly. You can speak of peaceful cooperation maybe in certain stages of Ancient Egypt, and very early Anatolian settlements like Catalhuyuk.
If the USA devolves into a mass of competing micro-states China will just pick them off one by one.
China is happy to just move into the sphere of influence Trump has vacated. His strategy only works if China plays ball to form a new colonially divided world, but they are probably way too smart to walk into that trap.
Just watching the US push their closest allies and trade partners into their arms is worth more than any “picking off” hillbilly states would do.
Just watching the US push their closest allies and trade partners into their arms is worth more than any “picking off” hillbilly states would do.
China is already owning the USA. Live fire drills off the coast of Australia just to test the waters. Zero response from America. What allies ?
The world is watching and the USA is failing. It won’t be long.
The world is watching and the USA is failing. It won’t be long.
How would city-states work in the age of nukes? It will lead to nothing but predation (see Mortal Engines for a YA take, what I'd give to watch the City of New York pursuing Roanoke or Asheville across the plains from atop the Chrysler building)
I don't see how these "tech titans" who understand economies of scale think scaling governments down is an improvement, so I suspect there is (self?) deception at play, and what they are optimizing for is minimizing oversight over their activities, and I suppose they see themselves as taking control of the cities and picking off the neighboring later... In this magical-thinking-land, Canada, Mexico, Russia and China will leave weakened city-states unmolested out of respect of the billionaires? The reasoning is juvenile and/or dishonest.
I don't see how these "tech titans" who understand economies of scale think scaling governments down is an improvement, so I suspect there is (self?) deception at play, and what they are optimizing for is minimizing oversight over their activities, and I suppose they see themselves as taking control of the cities and picking off the neighboring later... In this magical-thinking-land, Canada, Mexico, Russia and China will leave weakened city-states unmolested out of respect of the billionaires? The reasoning is juvenile and/or dishonest.
I wonder: do these people really believe this stuff is going to work out well, or is working out badly for most people the point?
For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.
In this case I’m not so sure. A lot of the NRx writings drip with contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate. This stuff has a real misanthropic quality veiled behind a lot of tedious overwrought sophistry.
Also: reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Didn’t meth hit around this time? Amphetamine abuse produces a specific sort of cognitive artifact.
Silicon Valley’s turn toward nihilistic accelerationism is probably chemically induced to some extent too.
The Russian Cosmists and the American futurist writers from the early days of the 60s counterculture (Leary, Wilson) are all way more interesting.
For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.
In this case I’m not so sure. A lot of the NRx writings drip with contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate. This stuff has a real misanthropic quality veiled behind a lot of tedious overwrought sophistry.
Also: reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Didn’t meth hit around this time? Amphetamine abuse produces a specific sort of cognitive artifact.
Silicon Valley’s turn toward nihilistic accelerationism is probably chemically induced to some extent too.
The Russian Cosmists and the American futurist writers from the early days of the 60s counterculture (Leary, Wilson) are all way more interesting.
What makes this such a viable conspiracy theory is just how unoriginal it is. Like feudalism never existed before, like the US never had company towns with people paid in an analog of crypto that could only be traded with that company…
Which is also what makes it scary because it’s difficult to imagine an elite cabal of multi-billionaires having nothing but complete indifference about the vast majority of people they’ve effectively isolated themselves from in their little echo chamber. And if you’re bored of being a CEO or VC where do you go from there?
I think you have to imagine just how out of touch with the people one has to be to genuinely believe that they can do better as a dictator, or the inner sanctum of a dictator, than the people can do as a democracy.
Which is also what makes it scary because it’s difficult to imagine an elite cabal of multi-billionaires having nothing but complete indifference about the vast majority of people they’ve effectively isolated themselves from in their little echo chamber. And if you’re bored of being a CEO or VC where do you go from there?
I think you have to imagine just how out of touch with the people one has to be to genuinely believe that they can do better as a dictator, or the inner sanctum of a dictator, than the people can do as a democracy.
You start helping humanity, as Christ did from the start or Gates did once he conquered the business world. Imagine the good someone as influential & rich as Thiel could do.
Instead his “good” is focused on transforming society for unclear societal benefit. How do the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed benefit from living in ocean communities or as city states?
Instead his “good” is focused on transforming society for unclear societal benefit. How do the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed benefit from living in ocean communities or as city states?
> How do the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed benefit from living in ocean communities or as city states?
You mean the millstone around the neck of society? The thinking goes: getting rid of entitlements supporting these groups will lower taxes and improve the allocation of capital, an all-round win, except for the guy who got too sick or too old to work.
You mean the millstone around the neck of society? The thinking goes: getting rid of entitlements supporting these groups will lower taxes and improve the allocation of capital, an all-round win, except for the guy who got too sick or too old to work.
"Politics is the means by which men without principles lead men without memory."
> For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.
The catch is that today we are literally living what Karl Marx predicted to the letter.
The catch is that today we are literally living what Karl Marx predicted to the letter.
I often compare Ayn Rand and Karl Marx in the following way: both of them were pretty good critics. They pointed out a lot of problems with the systems they were criticizing. I don't think either one of them had good solutions.
It's much easier to criticize than to build or fix.
It's much easier to criticize than to build or fix.
>reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed.
Nazis/fash were well known meth heads. Mescaline was also available across Wien and Weimar, my great grandma used to push a little on the side.
>contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate
Sure does! Bigger question is, where does all that self hate come from? Because I've never met a person who likes to hate themself.
Could it be, perhaps, that... it's something that has been internalized first? Sort of a "seeing others hate you turns you into a hateful person" type of situation?
Nazis/fash were well known meth heads. Mescaline was also available across Wien and Weimar, my great grandma used to push a little on the side.
>contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate
Sure does! Bigger question is, where does all that self hate come from? Because I've never met a person who likes to hate themself.
Could it be, perhaps, that... it's something that has been internalized first? Sort of a "seeing others hate you turns you into a hateful person" type of situation?
Edit: there is a book called Blitzed about how a lot of people in the third reich we’re on drugs, especially meth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
As for self hate: A ton of nerds were picked on mercilessly as children. I don’t mean just teasing either, but routine physical assault. I know from experience.
If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test.
When I was older I learned that my personal tormentors were all victims of extreme domestic abuse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
As for self hate: A ton of nerds were picked on mercilessly as children. I don’t mean just teasing either, but routine physical assault. I know from experience.
If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test.
When I was older I learned that my personal tormentors were all victims of extreme domestic abuse.
Mine weren't.
I see what you mean. But none of the people in question 'tried to inflict violence on others', they wrote books didn't they? Sort of extended lay takes on why they think this violence is so ubiquitous in their life, why they've been subjected to it, and what should "we all" do about it.
(The fools. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey comprehend, monkey turn into a giant finger pointing at giant complex problem over there, monkey gets covered in shit again by the other monkeys. Because that's not a problem, that's the feeder. "Silly book writing monkey! Pooh pooh, go suffer elsewhere!")
>If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test.
How certain are you of the legitimacy of the testing authority? Because that "test" sounds more like a cruel human experiment. I am instead reminded of another test, conducted by a certain old man on a certain mountain...
I see what you mean. But none of the people in question 'tried to inflict violence on others', they wrote books didn't they? Sort of extended lay takes on why they think this violence is so ubiquitous in their life, why they've been subjected to it, and what should "we all" do about it.
(The fools. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey comprehend, monkey turn into a giant finger pointing at giant complex problem over there, monkey gets covered in shit again by the other monkeys. Because that's not a problem, that's the feeder. "Silly book writing monkey! Pooh pooh, go suffer elsewhere!")
>If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test.
How certain are you of the legitimacy of the testing authority? Because that "test" sounds more like a cruel human experiment. I am instead reminded of another test, conducted by a certain old man on a certain mountain...
An idiot inflicts violence directly. A smart sadist tells others to do it with a convincing rationale. Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot probably never killed anyone.
It’s sort of like the saying: if an idiot wants to rob a bank he gets a gun and a ski mask. If a smart person wants to rob a bank they get a banking license.
As for the test: there is no authority. It’s implied by reality and by game theory.
It’s sort of like the saying: if an idiot wants to rob a bank he gets a gun and a ski mask. If a smart person wants to rob a bank they get a banking license.
As for the test: there is no authority. It’s implied by reality and by game theory.
"Reality"? That was the thing they teach at uni wasn't it? Or maybe that was "game theory", and "reality" was the one that's on the telly? I'm confused!
Point being, not too cash money of you to posit the self-evidence of certain conclusions that feel morally authoritative and ethically certain, while simultaneously moving the goalposts on the parallel thesis. I kinda thought we were talking about people who stayed writers after their first book?
I don't think Marx or Rand were sadists, and even if we assume ill intent on their part, the question of what causes the thing you call "sadism" remains open (although I kinda answered it, but I can't know for sure how true is my answer without the output of others, right?). If, of course, you believe in cause and effect and all that in the first place... You'd be surprised (I know I was) at how many people think they do, but their tracing of causes stops at the first though-terminating cliche.
In fact, here's one (Godwin style):
Hot take about that Schicklgruber kid you brought up and his ilk: monstrous characters, antropomorphic salient points for Pax Americana's culture in the best traditions of ancestor worship and all that, proper antonyms to "Santa Claus" really... I don't know if H****r ever killed anyone with his own hands (other than his own sorry ass in the end) yet I still find it's rather the people who created the circumstances for his emergence or exploited its effects (my first cell phone was named after one of them); the people who voted for him (very fine moral ethical prosocial people); his nominal opponents, who enabled him to take emergency powers (some of which went out to found Communist parties sporting concentration camps well into the Cold War); and, most importantly, the people who obeyed the dicta of the system of which he was figurehead ("don't look at me just doing my job"): those were the real culprits of that shameful page of world history.
And while individual military dictators have so far been limited by the normal human lifespan, those other mfs that empower them are still all over the place, being not identifiable individuals per se, but one might say cases of self-reproducing character types and life scripts. It is those that the radical ideologues — who are, unsurprisingly, pariahs in pleasant company (of Westerners) — are useful in identifying and counteracting. But the Westerner, being a memetically vulnerable humanimal, apparently can't read a book without suspending disbelief...
Which is how you get edgelords who personally identify with the problem statement. You know the character type. May you never know the associated life script :)
Point being, not too cash money of you to posit the self-evidence of certain conclusions that feel morally authoritative and ethically certain, while simultaneously moving the goalposts on the parallel thesis. I kinda thought we were talking about people who stayed writers after their first book?
I don't think Marx or Rand were sadists, and even if we assume ill intent on their part, the question of what causes the thing you call "sadism" remains open (although I kinda answered it, but I can't know for sure how true is my answer without the output of others, right?). If, of course, you believe in cause and effect and all that in the first place... You'd be surprised (I know I was) at how many people think they do, but their tracing of causes stops at the first though-terminating cliche.
In fact, here's one (Godwin style):
Hot take about that Schicklgruber kid you brought up and his ilk: monstrous characters, antropomorphic salient points for Pax Americana's culture in the best traditions of ancestor worship and all that, proper antonyms to "Santa Claus" really... I don't know if H****r ever killed anyone with his own hands (other than his own sorry ass in the end) yet I still find it's rather the people who created the circumstances for his emergence or exploited its effects (my first cell phone was named after one of them); the people who voted for him (very fine moral ethical prosocial people); his nominal opponents, who enabled him to take emergency powers (some of which went out to found Communist parties sporting concentration camps well into the Cold War); and, most importantly, the people who obeyed the dicta of the system of which he was figurehead ("don't look at me just doing my job"): those were the real culprits of that shameful page of world history.
And while individual military dictators have so far been limited by the normal human lifespan, those other mfs that empower them are still all over the place, being not identifiable individuals per se, but one might say cases of self-reproducing character types and life scripts. It is those that the radical ideologues — who are, unsurprisingly, pariahs in pleasant company (of Westerners) — are useful in identifying and counteracting. But the Westerner, being a memetically vulnerable humanimal, apparently can't read a book without suspending disbelief...
Which is how you get edgelords who personally identify with the problem statement. You know the character type. May you never know the associated life script :)
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The states were too small and numerous to effectively practice Realpolitik.
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That's where the 'reactionary' part of neoreactionary comes from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
I don't get how they can predict AI becoming powerful enough to revamp the entire economy and automate labor, but not powerful enough to just wrest control from them and then do whatever it wants to do instead.
The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
Primarily because AI, artificial as it is does not want. People want. This doesn’t preclude programming something to do so, however it’s relatively long indirect link to any of the boogieman scenarios people like to anthropomorphize ideas into. The other scenario - people having a very powerful tool and imposing their will against everyone else is something that already happens and AI provides a natural step.
Ah, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades.
The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks.
Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.
The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks.
Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.
Very funny how Thiel is such a Lord of the Rings fan and he got wormtongued by this guy.
Yet somehow idolizes Mordor as simply technologically advanced whereas everything outside it is “mystical and environmental and nothing works”.
This guy thinks nature doesn’t “work”
This guy thinks nature doesn’t “work”
I find it uncanny how much the ring's effects on its wearers match modern smartphone addiction, and how much the working mode of Denethor's corrupted palantir match the way modern disinformation works.
Makes me think that, as with SciFi dystopias, they took LOTR as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale.
Makes me think that, as with SciFi dystopias, they took LOTR as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale.
Conservatives have the media literacy of a dead chicken.
See: necessity of writers of The Boys making it increasingly obvious that homelander & co are are the bad guys. So many conservatives are stunned when they learn homelander is directly written based on trump.
See: necessity of writers of The Boys making it increasingly obvious that homelander & co are are the bad guys. So many conservatives are stunned when they learn homelander is directly written based on trump.
the rest are hypnotised as they try to understand urbit, which is to computers as the Bogdanov mathematical thesis was to pure maths.
Urbit was essentially Yarvin's political ideology written as a programming system. It was all about being king over the Urbit address space and creating a feudal community of super users ruling over regular users.
Read his stuff years ago and it's so transparently ... stupid.
You really have to be blessed with the right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy to think that he's somebody to listen to.
You really have to be blessed with the right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy to think that he's somebody to listen to.
Reading Yarvin, I get the impression that he has never seriously investigated and contemplated how both governments and corporations work. His ideas are very feels-oriented. He makes a lot of bizarre and invalid assertions about both regarding operations, inputs, and outputs. He seems to live in an ironically academic affluenza bubble that's quite divorced from reality.
He is a fairly deplorable contributor to political theory and an uninspiring writer who hasn't done anything useful in any of his endeavours as far as I an tell. Has Urbit ever done anything useful? How much money has gone into it, and how much of it was his? Wait, sorry Curtis; tell me again about the efficiency of private corporations.
He is a fairly deplorable contributor to political theory and an uninspiring writer who hasn't done anything useful in any of his endeavours as far as I an tell. Has Urbit ever done anything useful? How much money has gone into it, and how much of it was his? Wait, sorry Curtis; tell me again about the efficiency of private corporations.
Or you just have to be the Vice President of the United States!
> Ah, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades.
Many such cases: Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc.
It's really bizarre that these bozos seem to be in control now. Don't see how it ends well.
Many such cases: Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc.
It's really bizarre that these bozos seem to be in control now. Don't see how it ends well.
Yudkowsky isn't a billionaire nor someone who cons them. Did you mean someone else?
Yudkowsky’s MIRI was funded by Thiel in its early days. And I think that was a good thing btw. They have a noble mission.
I doubt Kurzweil is a billionaire as well.
I doubt Kurzweil is a billionaire as well.
It’s pretty clear to me they mean Yudkowsky is another con ?
I'm not aware of anything he sales, where to do I buy his merch? Jones had horse pills.
Do you have a specific criticism of anything Yarvin has said? Specifically the things which he talks about in every interview he's given in the past 5 years.
It has become imperative, if anyone wants to seriously critique Land, that they gain a strong familiarity with the work of Immanuel Kant. Land's reading of Kant is perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most politically crucial, of our generation. Start with the Critique of Pure Reason.
I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
I read one article by Yarvin in 2015 and enjoyed it. I made numerous attempts after that to read him again and have never been able to finish one of his articles. He's always building to a point that never seems to arrive. Looking at where he is now I'm glad I made the decision to ignore him.
I also got filtered by Land, though, so take that for what it's worth.
I also got filtered by Land, though, so take that for what it's worth.
So the thing about nove fast and break things is that you end up with a million broken things and people.
Even the magnates should figure out it is not going to help them. Which is why they actually move slow.
Even the magnates should figure out it is not going to help them. Which is why they actually move slow.
Nick Land is a philosopher who had a mental breakdown taking speed, blasting jungle music, and croaking into a microphone and I think it’s not coincidental that many of the people I’ve met who believe in this stuff have a relationship with amphetamines/MDMA. Andreessen name checked him in his accelerationist manifesto, which is funny because the manifesto is all about how tech is supposedly “pro-human” and Land was very explicitly anti humanist.
The missing detail is that he was doing this whilst being the stereotypical midlife crisis lecturer who finally finds a peer group who respects the avant-garde nature and intellectual depth of his philosophy by inviting first year undergrads to enjoy their first acid trips in his flat. Eventually he managed to find a group of people impressionable and emotionally immature enough to find his schtick impressive without him having to get them high first by re-emerging as a figure on the fringe right. This involved quite a pivot on notional values and inspirations, but that was only a problem if you assumed there was any substance to it in the first place.
Found the Stoic :)
You're absolutely right - Land's vision of technocapital is fundamentally anti-human, while Marc Andreessen's is pro-human. Mark Fisher criticized Land for underestimating the importance of the human face in keeping capitalism functional. However, I'd argue that for Land, camouflage has always been central to pre-singularity capitalism. A human face can serve as useful cover, helping technocapital advance toward its ultimately non-human ends.
Millenarian philosophers whose arguments rest on this kind of technological singularity/rapture event, especially one fueled by technocapital development have to contend with the fact that historically capital has stepped away from the fray multiple times. And it's in their interest to, as they want to preserve class relations. A bolstered welfare state and worker protections passed during times of upheaval have happened periodically when there's been backlash. This is how we end up in "The End of History", and though that seems to be unraveling, there's no reason to believe the politics of today aren't a temporary push of capital to reorganize the world that will also come with a backlash. This is where I take issue with orthodox Marxism, because ultimately capital does not want to destroy class relations. Will this be the case in the future? I'm skeptical of anyone saying it won't or can't, but I ultimately have no interest in this kind of prediction market philosophy of historical materialism.
Mental breakdowns, blasting jungle music, and croaking into microphones are wholesome and meaningful human activities belonging to a long-lived tradition that perhaps predates you. I honestly can't imagine what must be going on in the head of the kind of person who finds them reproachable.
"Just saying no" to drugs in 2025 is like refusing to use computers and the Internet. Sure, you can do just fine without them, but you're locking yourself out of a whole realm of the world, since an illicit psychoactive drug is not just a substance - it's a well-established global network of independent human-scale (but not always human-shaped) agents that does not cease to exist when you successfully ignore it. It's no coincidence that chemical neuroaugmentation has developed hand in hand with the silicon pseudocognition that lets us write to each other over a wire :)
And that's exactly why the goody-two-shoes humanist-by-default muh work-and-family type economic agents never know what hit 'em when weird shit inevitably hits the global fan. Though personally, I would prefer a world designed by acidheads, or even opiate addicts, rather than the present inane timeline, which is largely the work of coke fiends (and their industrious flunkies the speediots) over the course of the last half century or so.
Spoiler, kids: contrary to naming convention, amphetamine and its derivatives do not "speed" you up in any meaningful way.
(EDIT: for the sake of it)
"Just saying no" to drugs in 2025 is like refusing to use computers and the Internet. Sure, you can do just fine without them, but you're locking yourself out of a whole realm of the world, since an illicit psychoactive drug is not just a substance - it's a well-established global network of independent human-scale (but not always human-shaped) agents that does not cease to exist when you successfully ignore it. It's no coincidence that chemical neuroaugmentation has developed hand in hand with the silicon pseudocognition that lets us write to each other over a wire :)
And that's exactly why the goody-two-shoes humanist-by-default muh work-and-family type economic agents never know what hit 'em when weird shit inevitably hits the global fan. Though personally, I would prefer a world designed by acidheads, or even opiate addicts, rather than the present inane timeline, which is largely the work of coke fiends (and their industrious flunkies the speediots) over the course of the last half century or so.
Spoiler, kids: contrary to naming convention, amphetamine and its derivatives do not "speed" you up in any meaningful way.
(EDIT: for the sake of it)
These are not the loving and empathetic acid heads you would believe they are.
Those ones do not write angry half baked manifestos and try and take over the world and flex their power on everyone in their path.
Usually they just realize the trees are talking to us and very important and we shouldn’t cut them all down. That kind of thing. Long term thinking.
These guys just want to be king of the castle. And god knows what happens if they achieve it all and then get bored
Those ones do not write angry half baked manifestos and try and take over the world and flex their power on everyone in their path.
Usually they just realize the trees are talking to us and very important and we shouldn’t cut them all down. That kind of thing. Long term thinking.
These guys just want to be king of the castle. And god knows what happens if they achieve it all and then get bored
Oh I'm already perfectly robbed of the delusion that LSD somehow makes people loving, empathetic, or long term thinking (the last one being a mixed blessing in its own right: someone might as well say, in the long term I'm dead with 100% probability, so let it all burn!)
That whole "psychedelic enlightenment" meme is half due to the privilege of narrow-mindedness uniquely permitted to the college-educated (whose psychedelic journeys usually end up with the proverbial lousy T-shirt), half elaborate hypermedia smoke screen (deployed by you-know-they-know-you-know-who by means of the Learies, Lillies, and other difficult to pronounce for our East Asian strategic partners Huxleys)
As a matter of fact, it gets worse. I've observed psychedelics assist people's slide into faschizoid thinking on multiple occasions. My point was more like, cocaine turns people into peasants, maaan. You've never seen? And they've already been in charge for a long time, surprise surprise. And they're hella bored, too, which is why the things you must've been observing if we're at all on the same planet have been occurring at an ever more farcical cadence. (Therefore, according to your own reasoning, you're god. Enjoy! ;)
That whole "psychedelic enlightenment" meme is half due to the privilege of narrow-mindedness uniquely permitted to the college-educated (whose psychedelic journeys usually end up with the proverbial lousy T-shirt), half elaborate hypermedia smoke screen (deployed by you-know-they-know-you-know-who by means of the Learies, Lillies, and other difficult to pronounce for our East Asian strategic partners Huxleys)
As a matter of fact, it gets worse. I've observed psychedelics assist people's slide into faschizoid thinking on multiple occasions. My point was more like, cocaine turns people into peasants, maaan. You've never seen? And they've already been in charge for a long time, surprise surprise. And they're hella bored, too, which is why the things you must've been observing if we're at all on the same planet have been occurring at an ever more farcical cadence. (Therefore, according to your own reasoning, you're god. Enjoy! ;)
I think you grossly misunderstand and misrepresented what I said.
Bad form.
Bad form.
>"Just saying no" to drugs in 2025 is like refusing to use computers and the Internet.
Nah not really. You need computers and the internet to engage with the modern world but not doing drugs is fine. I mean they can be interesting but also have well documented downsides.
A possible real world example - I'm guessing here is Elon. The pre drugged up one of a decade ago building rockets and cars I thought was cool. The current Elon doing nazi salutes and cruelly firing people looks to me like someone who's done too many drugs. You can ask yourself which you'd rather be.
Nah not really. You need computers and the internet to engage with the modern world but not doing drugs is fine. I mean they can be interesting but also have well documented downsides.
A possible real world example - I'm guessing here is Elon. The pre drugged up one of a decade ago building rockets and cars I thought was cool. The current Elon doing nazi salutes and cruelly firing people looks to me like someone who's done too many drugs. You can ask yourself which you'd rather be.
And, to your edit: wouldn't take that dude for much of an example of anything really. Except "how do you do fellow kids" IRL - he's such an obvious plant!
All the people near and far who have been putting up with his existence for the past decade, now they could sure use a fat ass jolt to the ol' central nervous. Except they fear it would make their wives invoke Mumbo Jumbo!
All the people near and far who have been putting up with his existence for the past decade, now they could sure use a fat ass jolt to the ol' central nervous. Except they fear it would make their wives invoke Mumbo Jumbo!
Alas, so does engaging with the modern world...
You should not be assuming one's politics just because they take stimulants and listen to jungle music. That is textbook prejudice.
I kind of missed the assuming politics. What political view does stimulants jungle music imply? I mean I've been to clubs with that and not noticed particular politics.
OP said,
> I think it’s not coincidental that many of the people I’ve met who believe in this stuff have a relationship with amphetamines/MDMA
> I think it’s not coincidental that many of the people I’ve met who believe in this stuff have a relationship with amphetamines/MDMA
DEI for tweakers!
Some of us are still Marxists, you know ;)
this article is just a summary of things curtis yarvin originally said over 5 years ago and a Marinetti article that was in new scientist a few weeks back
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futu...
in short, this substack article share by op is probably just ai generated slop
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futu...
in short, this substack article share by op is probably just ai generated slop
On what basis do you make this accusation? Does HN need a new rule specifying what the other rules already explain? Give OP the benefit of the doubt. I read the entire article and it was absolutely not LLM-generated.
The word count for "delve" is zero, so maybe not AI slop.
Yeah, I am not sure who this author is but it is at least a useful summary of the dynamics and history of neoreactionary movement. I don’t think most small l-and-c liberals and conservatives have any idea of what they’re up against, and are simply bewildered by what’s happening.
One thing I never understood - what's the plan for these accelerationists / techno monarchs if the "plebs" simply decide to say no, and rather just cut off their heads?
If history has shown one thing, it is that it is much easier for the working/lower class to overthrow the upper class, than the opposite.
If history has shown one thing, it is that it is much easier for the working/lower class to overthrow the upper class, than the opposite.
Probably they do not even think about it. Have big secluded houses, lot of security, armed guards, cameras etc. They probably do not think about what if power grid will be destroyed/disabled, without power most of security will not work. Armed guards most probably will not throw away their life for them because they have their own life and families to think about when attacked by hundreds of people. Or think that they will be protected by police or military. But those are also rather common folk so probably would rather side with people instead of those techno-nobles. Finally they might think that they will be able to run with helicopter or plane. But you need people to operate those too. And those people may not exactly be willing to help at that time. Or just the road to the airport may be blocked.
In short I would say that they just do not comprehand the idea of world do not working in they favour. Of people not willing to do what they want.
But the get to that point life for vast number of people would have to get really unbearable.
If they reach their goal, they won't need a lower class, and they can address that problem however they see fit. A soldier might refuse to fire on their own side, but an autonomous drone won't.
It is very curious to me that people think of technology in such magic way.
For those drones work you need hundreds of people to operate that, monitor, maintain, make repairs stock the warehouse with spare parts etc. Look at military, how many people they need to operate all that complex machinery.
'How about AI controlling those drones' sure but then you just move maintaince of all of it to slightly different place. Probably even sabotage of AI datacenter would be much easier than autonoums or remote drones operated by hundreds of people.
You can create warfighting machines today capable of unspeakable horrors to another person if you merely give those engineers a suburban house in northern virginia in a good school district, evidently. Now imagine a future where the offer is not only that idyllic beltway suburban experience but also the realization that not taking that offer throws you in with the dogs in the lawless parts of the country that this autocratic government authority withdrew from over lack of profit motive. You’d probably do everything in your power to keep your head down and look like a good little engineer to master so your daughters don’t have to face a roving gang of perverts.
> For those drones work you need hundreds of people to operate that, monitor, maintain, make repairs stock the warehouse with spare parts etc
Not when AI bots do all of those things. This is the point, once that is reached the working class no longer has any sway over the upper classes and can be wiped out by an autonomous drone swarm that was built by an autonomous drone factory network.
Not when AI bots do all of those things. This is the point, once that is reached the working class no longer has any sway over the upper classes and can be wiped out by an autonomous drone swarm that was built by an autonomous drone factory network.
I think we lack many tools to achieve that.
Really silly example do we have autonoums drones that can turn on electrical fuse. You have hundreds of those in any factory. Or even simpler: can robot change light bulb? One can say that you do not need those in automated factory, which would meaybe the case but I think it would be much easier to have simple external light instead of equipping each automaton with their own light instead. With more more and more complex machines the maintenance of those grows rather exponentially. Add to it miniaturisation and you have modern electronic parts like SOC computers and gpus - they are very hard to rapair and most of the time just get replaced - because it is easier. Can you create autonomous factories with such technology?
I do not think so. The whole process would have to be redesigned from the bottom up. And I mean everything, gathering resources, refinement of those, packaging, transport, assembly of more complex parts, energy distribution... Everything basically to operable by not humans but by some kind of unified autonomous drones of similar design. And those drones would have to be part of the same industrial process so made and maintained with similar drones. This is not easy to achieve within bounds of our current civilisation. Probably something as simple as regular screw would have to be redesigned or replaced. I was trying to teach my kid to tight one of those not so long enough and it is not such easy thing to do for small child. Would autonomous drone would perform better? If specialised maybe. But you can't have hundreds of specialised drone designs if you want to build whole civilisation with them. After all human beings are mostly the same and we managed to built what we have now.
I do not think so. The whole process would have to be redesigned from the bottom up. And I mean everything, gathering resources, refinement of those, packaging, transport, assembly of more complex parts, energy distribution... Everything basically to operable by not humans but by some kind of unified autonomous drones of similar design. And those drones would have to be part of the same industrial process so made and maintained with similar drones. This is not easy to achieve within bounds of our current civilisation. Probably something as simple as regular screw would have to be redesigned or replaced. I was trying to teach my kid to tight one of those not so long enough and it is not such easy thing to do for small child. Would autonomous drone would perform better? If specialised maybe. But you can't have hundreds of specialised drone designs if you want to build whole civilisation with them. After all human beings are mostly the same and we managed to built what we have now.
Humanoid robots are coming:
- Figure: https://youtu.be/Z3yQHYNXPws
- Unitree: https://youtu.be/iULi4-qz22I
- 1X: https://youtu.be/uVcBa6NXAbk
and those are just the ones I know about. I'm sure the US and Chinese militaries are weighing up their options, too.
Of course, they don't need to be humanoid in the end: that just helps them maximise compatibility today. As they take over more of the process, they can specialise and scale up. Once you have robots working the entire process, the sky's the limit.
- Figure: https://youtu.be/Z3yQHYNXPws
- Unitree: https://youtu.be/iULi4-qz22I
- 1X: https://youtu.be/uVcBa6NXAbk
and those are just the ones I know about. I'm sure the US and Chinese militaries are weighing up their options, too.
Of course, they don't need to be humanoid in the end: that just helps them maximise compatibility today. As they take over more of the process, they can specialise and scale up. Once you have robots working the entire process, the sky's the limit.
yes, I am aware. Maybe I was not able to communicate my opinion on that matter clearly, so yet me reiterate: does any of those robots can replicate? Can any of this robot survive in harsh industrial environment without maintenance for long? I.e. usually home appliances have IP code 22 [0], in industrial complexes it is IP 44 as far as I remember. Outside you need IP 65 or 66. I doubt any of those robots have anything higher then 20.
And how about batteries?
I do not think we are everywhere near self-sufficient robotics.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_code
I do not think we are everywhere near self-sufficient robotics.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_code
I don't think weatherproofing them is as much as a lift as making them work autonomously: once you have a proof of concept, it's much easier to evolve it to whatever spec you need.
For replication, probably not by themselves, but as part of an industrial system run by elites? Sure, why not? You progressively automate all the prerequisites to the manufacturing of your robots until the entire supply chain is automated. If they're unlucky, The Machine Stops [0]. If they're not... well, they won't need us.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
For replication, probably not by themselves, but as part of an industrial system run by elites? Sure, why not? You progressively automate all the prerequisites to the manufacturing of your robots until the entire supply chain is automated. If they're unlucky, The Machine Stops [0]. If they're not... well, they won't need us.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
> Not when AI bots do all of those things
AI bots aren't close to doing all those things, but I'm glad the billionaires bought into the hype and tipped their hand prematurely.
AI bots aren't close to doing all those things, but I'm glad the billionaires bought into the hype and tipped their hand prematurely.
Historically the ruling class never gave a shit about what the masses thought. This is why the french killed their divine king in the late 1700s, the king did not think he was so hated where this would be possible.
Today, the equation is flipped. Rather than ignoring the masses, the rich have been indoctrinating them for 3-4 generations now. Pacifying them. Removing their own ability to generate their own thoughts and replacing them with thoughts purchased and dispersed through advertising channels.
On top of that westerners haven’t been truly poor in about a hundred years. We allege that we can just go back to french revolution sentiments where we are all poor and stealing, well that is a lot harder if you have never had to steal or be good with a knife in your life thus far. The western mind and body have both been coddled. They are not the grizzly parisian of 1789 in a Phrygian cap. They might have never even thrown a punch before.
Given this, why should the rich be worried? We are cattle in this generation, not wild bulls.
Today, the equation is flipped. Rather than ignoring the masses, the rich have been indoctrinating them for 3-4 generations now. Pacifying them. Removing their own ability to generate their own thoughts and replacing them with thoughts purchased and dispersed through advertising channels.
On top of that westerners haven’t been truly poor in about a hundred years. We allege that we can just go back to french revolution sentiments where we are all poor and stealing, well that is a lot harder if you have never had to steal or be good with a knife in your life thus far. The western mind and body have both been coddled. They are not the grizzly parisian of 1789 in a Phrygian cap. They might have never even thrown a punch before.
Given this, why should the rich be worried? We are cattle in this generation, not wild bulls.
the solution to this "problem" was mentioned: "get rid off the free press, dismantle USAID - this has already happened. NGOs and Universities are next."
History never had such powerful tech as we have now (or soon). Look at how it works in China, now add on top of this some AI which can better monitor your thoughts / education / etc. Future generations will be better "formatted" than we are
History never had such powerful tech as we have now (or soon). Look at how it works in China, now add on top of this some AI which can better monitor your thoughts / education / etc. Future generations will be better "formatted" than we are
The only way any of this works is if they have enough violence with no recourse against it to enforce their way of doing things. Otherwise you can literally just ignore them if you sufficiently think outside the box.
Who needs companies when you have communities? Who needs a central dictatorship or a party if you have a faster and more efficient democracy? State controlled media? We can have better decentralized ones.
The key thing is that the alternative has to be obviously better.
Who needs companies when you have communities? Who needs a central dictatorship or a party if you have a faster and more efficient democracy? State controlled media? We can have better decentralized ones.
The key thing is that the alternative has to be obviously better.
Centralized is much easier to set up as decentralized. You are on HN just by accident?
Same goes for democracy, it is a very complex system. That is why it is always under threat.
The way I see it, first tribes were fighting. In middle ages, cities were fighting each other. Later states started to fight. Finally we have a handful of superpowers fighting. It is part of globalization and earth is getting too small to scale that mechanism further.
Same goes for democracy, it is a very complex system. That is why it is always under threat.
The way I see it, first tribes were fighting. In middle ages, cities were fighting each other. Later states started to fight. Finally we have a handful of superpowers fighting. It is part of globalization and earth is getting too small to scale that mechanism further.
Some of them have very limited, anthropocentric visions of a world where they live as gods, empowered by godlike technology.
The more insightful ones see the end goal as one where humanity has been obliterated, with the successor expanding through the light cone, devouring all in its path. The (unspoken) rallying cry: "They will replace us." Naturally, this isn't a good popular slogan, so they ride along and let useful idiots do their thing.
The more insightful ones see the end goal as one where humanity has been obliterated, with the successor expanding through the light cone, devouring all in its path. The (unspoken) rallying cry: "They will replace us." Naturally, this isn't a good popular slogan, so they ride along and let useful idiots do their thing.
Hey Gemini, where can I buy guillotines?
That’s where drones and robots come in.
It helps when you control the flow of information though, makes it less likely that enough will day no.
Oligarchy, feudslism, dictatorships and other non-free forms of government is definitely not necessarily doomed to fail. Unfortunately.
I fear that with modern technology, controlling the masses is even easier, and we loose democracy. If not forever, at least for a long time.
Oligarchy, feudslism, dictatorships and other non-free forms of government is definitely not necessarily doomed to fail. Unfortunately.
I fear that with modern technology, controlling the masses is even easier, and we loose democracy. If not forever, at least for a long time.
You forget that it was blue collar populism that won this election. It's the upper class liberals that are clutching their pearls.
Leave for another country, enjoy the rest of their days in luxury. Truly an excruciating sentence. /s
There's a lot more logistical options for them these days. You'd only catch them if they made a serious blunder.
There's a lot more logistical options for them these days. You'd only catch them if they made a serious blunder.
I've long figured the essential knot at the bottom of this is: Do you agree with Land that intelligence and capitalism are in some sense "the same thing"?
I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that.
And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that.
And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
Intelligence to Nick Land is explicitly not about logic or things that further human values (he is, in fact, explicitly anti-human, which is an intellectual honesty that I have to respect a lot more than the people who have taken his ideas and run with them).
It's about how a system can observe changes, react to them, make decisions to further itself (not any particular values), and act on those decisions. Think about a cybernetic OODA loop. Systems that do so will outcompete and replace those that don't.
Capitalism is all about that. If there's a dollar on the ground, someone will pick it up quicker than someone who has to petition some other agent to acquire a lock. And if two agents can engage in a mutually productive trade, they will not only fire together but also modify the system such that they will wire together in the future to more efficiently acquire limited resources.
All that is solid melts into distributed representations. In a way, he takes all the smartest critiques of capitalism and decides, well, capitalism is going to win, so we might as well embrace the state it converges to. Or not, but it doesn't really matter.
It's about how a system can observe changes, react to them, make decisions to further itself (not any particular values), and act on those decisions. Think about a cybernetic OODA loop. Systems that do so will outcompete and replace those that don't.
Capitalism is all about that. If there's a dollar on the ground, someone will pick it up quicker than someone who has to petition some other agent to acquire a lock. And if two agents can engage in a mutually productive trade, they will not only fire together but also modify the system such that they will wire together in the future to more efficiently acquire limited resources.
All that is solid melts into distributed representations. In a way, he takes all the smartest critiques of capitalism and decides, well, capitalism is going to win, so we might as well embrace the state it converges to. Or not, but it doesn't really matter.
I have also always respected Land's intellectual honesty. I think the closest primary source to your point about the cybernetic OODA loop and competition is Land's text Against Orthogonality:
"Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment." [0]
[0] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality
"Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment." [0]
[0] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality
> "Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever
This is bunk, and only works when there's one variable that controls who wins, and there are no diminishing returns. Its sounds as naive as "Any athlete that uses X to improve themself will outcompete one that directs themselves towards any other goals whatsoever"
This is bunk, and only works when there's one variable that controls who wins, and there are no diminishing returns. Its sounds as naive as "Any athlete that uses X to improve themself will outcompete one that directs themselves towards any other goals whatsoever"
The point of Land is that there is an underlying reality. Systems that make use of that reality most effectively are those that will propagate and dominate that reality. Landian intelligence isn't about scoring high on the SAT (which, obviously, won't make someone a star basketball player), but instead about how a system can react to reality to propagate itself. Almost tautologically, systems that make better use of reality outcompete those that make worse use of reality.
I said "X" instead of intelligence, strength, mass, reaction time, precise control, spatial awareness, or any other single characteristic because the best athletes have to be great on multiple dimensions - not just one. The same goes for "intelligence", unless it's used by Land as a catch-all phrase for multiple attributes, and if so, the statement becomes pointlessly vague, and papers over the fact that some of these attributes have physical limits and can't be changed by the self-improving intelligence, this limits are present in any medium e.g. latency, bandwidth, signal attenuation
I'm quite a fan of that piece as well. I don't think I agree with it exactly as stated, the claim feels like it can be usefully weakened - but it's crisp, so I like it the same way I like Nietzsche.
Is retrochronic yours? Nice project, if so. So much of his work is scattered across defunct blogs.
Yes, it's my project - thanks for the feedback! Tracking down the source material has been a real challenge since it's so scattered and often offline, but I'm hoping it makes things easier for anyone wanting to dive deep into the primary sources behind Land's main thesis.
More seriously, can you provide sources for your interpretation of Land's thesis as 'capitalism is intelligence'? Asking because I've always interpreted it more as 'capitalism is sentient' (which I have to admit is a pure, unadulterated cosmic horror moment right there) but I'm not a Land scholar, just an appreciator of weirdnesses.
Shoot, I think I heard him say it in some interview floating around YouTube a long time back. Let me see if I can dig it up.
Not Actually on YouTube, "A Quick Rundown of Accelerationism", 00:00:20. Right at the start.
>I think capitalism and artificial intelligence are the same thing. It's the same process. Capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production, and artificial intelligence can only come out of self-propelling capitalism.
He says "artificial" specifically, forgive my impudence. My read however is that that isn't a fundamental difference to him, it's just an artifact of the fact that silicon transistors relay information faster than biological neurons can. Intelligence is the same noumenon underneath, and it will assert itself one way or another as the fundamental pathfinding algorithm of matter.
EDIT: Ah, what's more, I believe sentience/ensoulment as it is usually defined is not really a thing Land is interested in as a philosophical object. The machine god at the end of time might end up being a total p-zombie for all he cares, so long as it puts the atoms into the right place. This is a common stumbling point in r/acc discussions: We're agnostic about whether anything is experiencing qualia here. That's a separate and more, uh, normal metaphysical debate. If such a thing even exists.
>I think capitalism and artificial intelligence are the same thing. It's the same process. Capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production, and artificial intelligence can only come out of self-propelling capitalism.
He says "artificial" specifically, forgive my impudence. My read however is that that isn't a fundamental difference to him, it's just an artifact of the fact that silicon transistors relay information faster than biological neurons can. Intelligence is the same noumenon underneath, and it will assert itself one way or another as the fundamental pathfinding algorithm of matter.
EDIT: Ah, what's more, I believe sentience/ensoulment as it is usually defined is not really a thing Land is interested in as a philosophical object. The machine god at the end of time might end up being a total p-zombie for all he cares, so long as it puts the atoms into the right place. This is a common stumbling point in r/acc discussions: We're agnostic about whether anything is experiencing qualia here. That's a separate and more, uh, normal metaphysical debate. If such a thing even exists.
Transcribed here (with some additional context): https://retrochronic.com/#interview
What can he possibly be basing this on? Sounds like a faith to me. They are trying to manufacture a god for the rest
Ain't that the million dollar question, my friend. I am not about to slog myself through enough Immanuel Kant to explain how to got there, though. I already had one undergrad.
You're right to notice a connection to theism here, though. It sounds nuts to see but I actually see some distant parallels between Land and Omohundro's ideas and, like, old gnostic traditions, or the early 20th century process philosophy of Charles Hartshorne.
You're right to notice a connection to theism here, though. It sounds nuts to see but I actually see some distant parallels between Land and Omohundro's ideas and, like, old gnostic traditions, or the early 20th century process philosophy of Charles Hartshorne.
Land is also explicitly referencing Omohundro and his Basic AI Drives in his work, e.g.:
"Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its own thing. That's what runaway means, as a virtual mind template. Omohundro explains the basics." [0]
"Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive." [1]
[0] https://retrochronic.com/#pythia-unbound
[1] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality
"Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its own thing. That's what runaway means, as a virtual mind template. Omohundro explains the basics." [0]
"Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive." [1]
[0] https://retrochronic.com/#pythia-unbound
[1] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality
>We're agnostic about whether anything is experiencing qualia here
Oh that's a great point! Vis a vis all the cogsci slop that regularly pretends to "explain consciousness", being agnostic about it sure beats the usual "not being able to comprehend the question in the first place" (as frequently exemplified by HN comment[er?]s under that type of headline)
Oh that's a great point! Vis a vis all the cogsci slop that regularly pretends to "explain consciousness", being agnostic about it sure beats the usual "not being able to comprehend the question in the first place" (as frequently exemplified by HN comment[er?]s under that type of headline)
A video link https://youtu.be/lrOVKHg_PJQ
I think it's plainly mumbo jumbo. I mean take:
"capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production"
We've had capitalism for centuries with no AI production. As a time saver I often find once someone comes up with one bit of nonsense you can find better things to do than analyse all their other statements in case there are some non bunk aspects.
I think it's plainly mumbo jumbo. I mean take:
"capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production"
We've had capitalism for centuries with no AI production. As a time saver I often find once someone comes up with one bit of nonsense you can find better things to do than analyse all their other statements in case there are some non bunk aspects.
>We've had capitalism for centuries with no AI production.
But it was capitalism that ended up producing AI. And if that's how things have ended up, then that must've been where things had been going all along, no? (Ask the Cheshire Cat for the opposite statement.) That's teleology for you, it's a thing that's usually obvious in hindsight, but, as you demonstrate, even that not always.
And if you and your ancestors have never lived under any other social system besides the one that evolved into contemporary capitalism, how would you even be able to make the distinction between the telos of capitalism and the telos of any other global process? What would be your point of reference, experientially speaking? Do you even know any other dreams besides the ones that capitalism dreams throughout your waking hours?
Back to Plato's cave with you it seems, and don't, I repeat, please don't think about limited liability corporations, the construct of "personhood" that the legal system ascribes them, and how the only thing that can even attempt to kill a corporation is a government (which is just another kind of "corporation", in the sense of rule-based meta-entity which uses human intelligence as a replaceable building block). And governments have been largely captured (outsmarted) by the corporations. For decades at this point. Qui bono? You Bono?
On your way there allow me to guess, you believe that there's least one school of economics which is not "mumbo jumbo" (a term, besides the tastelessness of dismissiveness, also bearing subtle racist connotations), don't you?
EDIT: Check this shit out:
>Mungo Park's travel journal Travels in the Interior of Africa (1795) describes 'Mumbo Jumbo' as a character, complete with "masquerade habit", whom Mandinka males would dress up as in order to resolve domestic disputes
From Wikipedia, emphasis mine. Consider!
But it was capitalism that ended up producing AI. And if that's how things have ended up, then that must've been where things had been going all along, no? (Ask the Cheshire Cat for the opposite statement.) That's teleology for you, it's a thing that's usually obvious in hindsight, but, as you demonstrate, even that not always.
And if you and your ancestors have never lived under any other social system besides the one that evolved into contemporary capitalism, how would you even be able to make the distinction between the telos of capitalism and the telos of any other global process? What would be your point of reference, experientially speaking? Do you even know any other dreams besides the ones that capitalism dreams throughout your waking hours?
Back to Plato's cave with you it seems, and don't, I repeat, please don't think about limited liability corporations, the construct of "personhood" that the legal system ascribes them, and how the only thing that can even attempt to kill a corporation is a government (which is just another kind of "corporation", in the sense of rule-based meta-entity which uses human intelligence as a replaceable building block). And governments have been largely captured (outsmarted) by the corporations. For decades at this point. Qui bono? You Bono?
On your way there allow me to guess, you believe that there's least one school of economics which is not "mumbo jumbo" (a term, besides the tastelessness of dismissiveness, also bearing subtle racist connotations), don't you?
EDIT: Check this shit out:
>Mungo Park's travel journal Travels in the Interior of Africa (1795) describes 'Mumbo Jumbo' as a character, complete with "masquerade habit", whom Mandinka males would dress up as in order to resolve domestic disputes
From Wikipedia, emphasis mine. Consider!
> But it was capitalism that ended up producing AI
No, it was the scientific method. Back in the mid to late 19th century when scientific research was done in an open-source way without the presence of capital and corporations, science had the fastest progress it had in human history. After the capital took control of science and research through patents and funding, the rate of progress slowed greatly. Thomas Jefferson's views on patents also aligns with this: He said that countries that did not have patents were as productive as those that did have. (he was the first president of the patent office).
No, it was the scientific method. Back in the mid to late 19th century when scientific research was done in an open-source way without the presence of capital and corporations, science had the fastest progress it had in human history. After the capital took control of science and research through patents and funding, the rate of progress slowed greatly. Thomas Jefferson's views on patents also aligns with this: He said that countries that did not have patents were as productive as those that did have. (he was the first president of the patent office).
Surely there must be plenty of rigorous studies by now which convincingly demonstrate how "AI" as sold today is a bad idea? Not to mention tons of individual experiences which fail to be acknowledged by science as datapoints, for which we have the wonderful term "anecdata".
Neither seems to be stopping capitalism from forcing the existence of AI upon us (nor of the proto-AI technologies, such as the ones that gather data for it, or make public opinion receptive to it). Knowledge is [nothing without] power, and it saddens me to see how power-blind supposedly "intelligent" people keep making themselves, leaving the reins to self-important idiots who... do you think they even have an agenda? They're just like us, status monkeys doing whatever the smartphone commands them to do.
And this is, again, AI in the narrow, marketing sense. I'm one of those frowned upon people who say a corporation, or a government, already is an artificial intelligent subject, just a very slow one.
Neither seems to be stopping capitalism from forcing the existence of AI upon us (nor of the proto-AI technologies, such as the ones that gather data for it, or make public opinion receptive to it). Knowledge is [nothing without] power, and it saddens me to see how power-blind supposedly "intelligent" people keep making themselves, leaving the reins to self-important idiots who... do you think they even have an agenda? They're just like us, status monkeys doing whatever the smartphone commands them to do.
And this is, again, AI in the narrow, marketing sense. I'm one of those frowned upon people who say a corporation, or a government, already is an artificial intelligent subject, just a very slow one.
Wikipedia disagrees a little on mumbo jumbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbo_jumbo_(phrase)
Apparently it comes from the Mandinka word "Maamajomboo". I don't think using African words is racist, if anything it's pro African.
re "but it was capitalism that ended up producing AI", capitalism has also produced sandwich toasters for example but to thus declare "capitalism can only be sandwich toasters" would be equally silly as "capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production."
Apparently it comes from the Mandinka word "Maamajomboo". I don't think using African words is racist, if anything it's pro African.
re "but it was capitalism that ended up producing AI", capitalism has also produced sandwich toasters for example but to thus declare "capitalism can only be sandwich toasters" would be equally silly as "capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production."
Using an aspect of an African religion as a metonym for "worthless nonsense", sonorous as it is, is still pretty fucking colonialist.
And the example you give to point out what you think is a false equvalence, is itself a false equivalence. Nobody says sandwich toasters are eating the world, if anything they help to feed it :)
And the example you give to point out what you think is a false equvalence, is itself a false equivalence. Nobody says sandwich toasters are eating the world, if anything they help to feed it :)
I think it's more evolution that produced intelligence. Evolution also produced capitalism. Capitalism is just one environmental variation that evolution can run in.
Same conflation already happened upthread. Classic Sapir-Whorf stuff (rejected as that linguistic hypothesis might be.) Imagine trying to do philosophy in English, a language where blunt treachery passes for subtlety, and the normative complexity threshold is so pathetically low!
The phrase "artificial intelligence production" (as seen here https://etscrivner.github.io/cryptocurrent/#_footnotedef_22 - courtesy of https://retrochronic.com/#introduction - and Land's source [IS (has picture of)] a guy in a suit and tie and not presumably on speed! rejoice!) can mean either "production of artificial intelligence" or "artificial production of intelligence".
But it's very difficult to consistently point out the distinction between the two. Not without overloading the sentence up to the point of people starting to say things like "Mumbo Jumbo, go away, we are good and u r ghey!"
So, I'd rather describe that distinction as power fucking points:
- "evolution" [IS (the autopoiesis of)] "intelligence"
- "capitalism" [IS (the autopoiesis of)] "artificial intelligence"
All things considered, the notion of "intelligence" is itself pretty artificial. But I reckon yall are too intelligent to be ready for that conversation just yet. Give 'em time.
Clinton said it best: it all depends on what your definition of "is", is...
The phrase "artificial intelligence production" (as seen here https://etscrivner.github.io/cryptocurrent/#_footnotedef_22 - courtesy of https://retrochronic.com/#introduction - and Land's source [IS (has picture of)] a guy in a suit and tie and not presumably on speed! rejoice!) can mean either "production of artificial intelligence" or "artificial production of intelligence".
But it's very difficult to consistently point out the distinction between the two. Not without overloading the sentence up to the point of people starting to say things like "Mumbo Jumbo, go away, we are good and u r ghey!"
So, I'd rather describe that distinction as power fucking points:
- "evolution" [IS (the autopoiesis of)] "intelligence"
- "capitalism" [IS (the autopoiesis of)] "artificial intelligence"
All things considered, the notion of "intelligence" is itself pretty artificial. But I reckon yall are too intelligent to be ready for that conversation just yet. Give 'em time.
Clinton said it best: it all depends on what your definition of "is", is...
Thanks!
I can definitely see where he's coming from with that take, myself having grown up in a culture that has overwritten itself with capitalism over the course of scantly two generations. I'm saying that because I don't reckon it's the kind of thing one could recognize when one is on the inside of it. Not without fucking oneself up something wicked, anyway
I can definitely see where he's coming from with that take, myself having grown up in a culture that has overwritten itself with capitalism over the course of scantly two generations. I'm saying that because I don't reckon it's the kind of thing one could recognize when one is on the inside of it. Not without fucking oneself up something wicked, anyway
I have a research project on Nick Land's main thesis that capitalism and AI are identical.
It contains (almost) all primary sources for his thesis (182 as of this writing).
https://retrochronic.com/
It contains (almost) all primary sources for his thesis (182 as of this writing).
https://retrochronic.com/
You threw this elsewhere but I want to reiterate here, this is a really impressive work! I'm glad someone is out here piecing together all the shards of the vase like this.
Thanks so much! This project ended up being far more involved than I expected, given how scattered and arcane Land's work is. It's always nice to get some appreciation!
The `noproc` option kicked me out of HN before I could respond, so I've been waiting 3 hours to say - this is fantastic stuff. Impeccable research and presentation! It's just... beautiful.
Perhaps tangential, but is that even based on some existing package for such publications, or is it an entirely custom frontend? I'll be happy to know more about how this project came to be, from both the technical and the academic perspective.
Perhaps tangential, but is that even based on some existing package for such publications, or is it an entirely custom frontend? I'll be happy to know more about how this project came to be, from both the technical and the academic perspective.
Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it!
The frontend is built with Svelte (still on version 4) and SvelteKit. The project does not use any pre-existing package for publishing. The CSS is completely custom. The font is a custom build of Iosevka [0], which uses a diamond-shaped "0" to emphasize the centrality of zero in Land's work (e.g. Zero-Centric History [1]).
The project itself came about after a close friend sent me a picture of a Land book he had found at a library. I had read Land years ago - he was one of the reasons I got into coding - and it just struck me that I had never built anything related to his work. I was always fascinated by his capitalism = AI thesis, so I just dove back into his work and started building.
[0] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
[1] https://retrochronic.com/#zero-centric-history
The frontend is built with Svelte (still on version 4) and SvelteKit. The project does not use any pre-existing package for publishing. The CSS is completely custom. The font is a custom build of Iosevka [0], which uses a diamond-shaped "0" to emphasize the centrality of zero in Land's work (e.g. Zero-Centric History [1]).
The project itself came about after a close friend sent me a picture of a Land book he had found at a library. I had read Land years ago - he was one of the reasons I got into coding - and it just struck me that I had never built anything related to his work. I was always fascinated by his capitalism = AI thesis, so I just dove back into his work and started building.
[0] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
[1] https://retrochronic.com/#zero-centric-history
It’s a paper clip optimizer. RL. With a single goal.
Land has always argued with Omohundro against orthogonality and thus against paperclip maximizers, but the singular goal is correct: for him it's intelligence optimization.
> Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades
Not correct - in Ancient Egypt, all the land belonged to the people through the Pharaoh (great house), and they both had the independent agency to do voluntary trade with they wanted with part of the produce and lacked that agency as they had to pay some share from the land assigned to them as taxes.
> I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
Except the modern cultural paradigms originate from that very Ancient Egypt. From the monogamic marriage paradigm to higher education. And those Set, Horus etc have been meshed into the 'one god' concept as its aspects, and then that one god and practically every major thing in the Ancient Egyptian religion were used to create the modern religions. From 'weighing of the heart against a feather' for judging the goodness of the recently deceased in the afterlife to the very concept of after-life judgment, most religious belief traits come from Ancient Egyptian religion.
Not correct - in Ancient Egypt, all the land belonged to the people through the Pharaoh (great house), and they both had the independent agency to do voluntary trade with they wanted with part of the produce and lacked that agency as they had to pay some share from the land assigned to them as taxes.
> I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
Except the modern cultural paradigms originate from that very Ancient Egypt. From the monogamic marriage paradigm to higher education. And those Set, Horus etc have been meshed into the 'one god' concept as its aspects, and then that one god and practically every major thing in the Ancient Egyptian religion were used to create the modern religions. From 'weighing of the heart against a feather' for judging the goodness of the recently deceased in the afterlife to the very concept of after-life judgment, most religious belief traits come from Ancient Egyptian religion.
They're hiding ;)
Do supporters of this philosophy still self-identify as conservatives? Such radical futurist visions seem directly opposite to core conservative values.
The never really did. If you saw them referred to that you were getting flimsy analysis. These people have a much more purposeful, active, and visionary approach to politics and society than any conservative ever has. Conservatism, since 2018, can be pithily summed up by this quote:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Thiel et al's machinations are much more sophisticated than this quote (not an endorsement), but it basically does encapsulate the irritable gestures of your sundowning uncle and the cold selfishness of the old money class.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Thiel et al's machinations are much more sophisticated than this quote (not an endorsement), but it basically does encapsulate the irritable gestures of your sundowning uncle and the cold selfishness of the old money class.
Yarvin and Nick Land were always explicitly associated with neo-reaction (NRx), not conservatism, so this strikes me as a strange comment.
They do not, conservatism is seen as serving as a governor for liberalism and without conservatism liberalism would fail faster. Neo-reactionary is anti-enlightenment where some are accelerationists and others are not. The accelerationist support liberalism (to speed up the self-immolation) and the non-accelerationists support conservatism.
One way to look at it is how far back do you want to unwind the clock, if to the 90s then they consider that a 'this far and no further conservative' which they consider to be a liberal. You'd have to unwind the clock all the way to pre-enlightenment to get to the neo-reactionary position.
One way to look at it is how far back do you want to unwind the clock, if to the 90s then they consider that a 'this far and no further conservative' which they consider to be a liberal. You'd have to unwind the clock all the way to pre-enlightenment to get to the neo-reactionary position.
What is futurist about an oligarchy...or a monarchy? Surely it's essentially what China is now. We want that?
They never did and they don't claim to be conservative, in fact they reject it explicitly.
Most of the people in this story - most of the people in the current administrations - aren't originally conservative. Trump, Musk, Gabbard...
In a sense (American) politics is experiencing a vanishing middle of epic proportions where only two strongly held positions are becoming turbo capitalism or state communism. Trump et. al. call themselves progressive only in so forth as their voters dream of the return of the good old days.
In a sense (American) politics is experiencing a vanishing middle of epic proportions where only two strongly held positions are becoming turbo capitalism or state communism. Trump et. al. call themselves progressive only in so forth as their voters dream of the return of the good old days.
> In a sense (American) politics is experiencing a vanishing middle of epic proportions
Is that true? Democrats are pretty centrist by non-American standards.
Is that true? Democrats are pretty centrist by non-American standards.
The democrats still haven't had their "tea party" and stick to economic liberalism with a dash of mild progressivism. Maybe that's why they're losing steam?
> state communism
Nonsense Republican propaganda with no basis in reality.
Single-payer healthcare and decent labor laws won’t make the sky fall. Republican BS.
Nonsense Republican propaganda with no basis in reality.
Single-payer healthcare and decent labor laws won’t make the sky fall. Republican BS.
Fundamentally, conservatism is about conserving (and reinforcing) existing power structures. Everything else is just set dressing.
Conservatives are currently dismantling the Federal bureaucracy, not conserving it.
The federal bureaucracy isn't the power structure, it's a threat to the power structure, hence it being dismantled by the power structure.
In order to conserve (well, further entrench) the power of the oligarchy.
I have watched a lot of Curtis Yarvin interviews.
He is so well read that what he is saying doesn't work in a blog summary like this.
I think he also says things exactly so people write blogs like this to make him sound extra controversial for marketing purposes.
If he just said what he really believes, that the US needs a president like FDR, it would get no traction.
Implying democracy is dead while really meaning Athenian democracy that we don't have and that the US needs a monarch when really talking about FDR/Hoover/Coolidge is a professional writer basically marketing themselves so other writers like this run with it and do marketing for him.
I get the feeling he is doing a type of "dangerous idea" performance art because it is really hard to be a professional blogger.
Almost the way the Ice-T band Body Count went from obviously stirring up controversy for the song Cop Killer for marketing purposes to Ice-T playing a cop on Law and Order.
Conservative at this point has as much to do with conservation as Liberal has to do with laissez-faire economics.
He is so well read that what he is saying doesn't work in a blog summary like this.
I think he also says things exactly so people write blogs like this to make him sound extra controversial for marketing purposes.
If he just said what he really believes, that the US needs a president like FDR, it would get no traction.
Implying democracy is dead while really meaning Athenian democracy that we don't have and that the US needs a monarch when really talking about FDR/Hoover/Coolidge is a professional writer basically marketing themselves so other writers like this run with it and do marketing for him.
I get the feeling he is doing a type of "dangerous idea" performance art because it is really hard to be a professional blogger.
Almost the way the Ice-T band Body Count went from obviously stirring up controversy for the song Cop Killer for marketing purposes to Ice-T playing a cop on Law and Order.
Conservative at this point has as much to do with conservation as Liberal has to do with laissez-faire economics.
> Implying democracy is dead while really meaning Athenian democracy that we don't have and that the US needs a monarch when really talking about FDR/Hoover/Coolidge is a professional writer basically marketing themselves so other writers like this run with it and do marketing for him.
Lots of words boiling down to "clickbait".
Lots of words boiling down to "clickbait".
> the US needs a president like FDR
Conservatives like to argue that FDR was a dictator. And then argue that they want a "conservative dictator like FDR."
In fact, FDR was a democratic leader with a massive and overwhelming popular mandate. His mandate came because people could see that he was overturning the Gilded Age power structure and creating a system that made people's lives better.
Conservatives like to argue that FDR was a dictator. And then argue that they want a "conservative dictator like FDR."
In fact, FDR was a democratic leader with a massive and overwhelming popular mandate. His mandate came because people could see that he was overturning the Gilded Age power structure and creating a system that made people's lives better.
You're just justifying why his dictatorship-lite was ok, which is fine. But how does any of the 2nd paragraph counter right wing calls for their own?
I'm not a fan of the strongman approach no matter which party is doing it, but I think the argument is that conservatives want the power of an FDR-like figure absent any of the actual factors that contributed to the real FDR having that power.
FDR was faced with two of the greatest challenges to face the US, the great depression and WWII, and he had overwhelming support from the voters in how he was addressing those challenges as reaffirmed in 4 elections in a row. In my opinion that still doesn't justify FDR's extraordinary take on presidential power, and the passage of the 22nd amendment among other things seems to suggest mine was not an isolated view, but it's hard to argue FDR didn't have a unique set of circumstances and a rare mandate.
Some conservatives seem to want to emulate FDR's approach of having the President act like a King, but skip over the circumstances and mandate unique to FDR that "justified" that approach. It might be different if they were trying to build such a massive, enduring electoral mandate by identify some generational problem to solve with real solutions and a man or woman of destiny to embrace their historical moment. But they don't have any of that and are nevertheless jumping to the President=King step anyways, like a store brand FDR knockoff.
FDR was faced with two of the greatest challenges to face the US, the great depression and WWII, and he had overwhelming support from the voters in how he was addressing those challenges as reaffirmed in 4 elections in a row. In my opinion that still doesn't justify FDR's extraordinary take on presidential power, and the passage of the 22nd amendment among other things seems to suggest mine was not an isolated view, but it's hard to argue FDR didn't have a unique set of circumstances and a rare mandate.
Some conservatives seem to want to emulate FDR's approach of having the President act like a King, but skip over the circumstances and mandate unique to FDR that "justified" that approach. It might be different if they were trying to build such a massive, enduring electoral mandate by identify some generational problem to solve with real solutions and a man or woman of destiny to embrace their historical moment. But they don't have any of that and are nevertheless jumping to the President=King step anyways, like a store brand FDR knockoff.
FDR didn't "act like a King" he worked through congress, getting enabling legislation and appropriations for every thing he did.
In addition to winning his own elections he also maintained large Democratic majorities in both houses of congress. The only branch that opposed him was the unelected one, because every opportunity the people had to consent to what FDR was doing, they gave him not just a victory but an overwhelming one.
In addition to winning his own elections he also maintained large Democratic majorities in both houses of congress. The only branch that opposed him was the unelected one, because every opportunity the people had to consent to what FDR was doing, they gave him not just a victory but an overwhelming one.
His planned attack on the judicial branch was a step too far for me. Unelected or not, the Supreme Court is still part of the US system of democratic governance and trying to change the workings of the system for near term partisan gain is undemocratic whatever the motivations.
But you're also absolutely right that FDR wasn't ruling by executive fiat and instead also had major legislative majorities backing and enacting his policies. He really wasn't a king so much as the leader of a political juggernaut able to achieve significant sweeping changes unlikely most other presidents. If anything that makes the cheap imitation American conservatives are pursuing even more notable. FDR was powered by a movement based on overwhelming victory in multiple elections in election cycle after election cycle. Modern American conservatives want to translate one historically unimpressive presidential election victory and a narrow, relatively weak legislative majority, into the same sort of seismic generational change. It's not store brand FDR, it's Temu knockoff FDR.
But you're also absolutely right that FDR wasn't ruling by executive fiat and instead also had major legislative majorities backing and enacting his policies. He really wasn't a king so much as the leader of a political juggernaut able to achieve significant sweeping changes unlikely most other presidents. If anything that makes the cheap imitation American conservatives are pursuing even more notable. FDR was powered by a movement based on overwhelming victory in multiple elections in election cycle after election cycle. Modern American conservatives want to translate one historically unimpressive presidential election victory and a narrow, relatively weak legislative majority, into the same sort of seismic generational change. It's not store brand FDR, it's Temu knockoff FDR.
this appeal to 5D chess falls on its face when you watch what they do. they do things that cause harm and don't care. you don't become a billionaire by caring about other people. empathy doesn't just snap on when your net worth hits one billion.
> since we develop Artificial Intelligence simply because we can, without any plan, without knowing where we’re going, and therefore without giving it any purpose, it means Artificial Intelligence is its own cause!
What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
If I hit my finger with a hammer, I yell without any plan, so... the yell is its own cause? Who believes this nonsense? It fails the most elementary logic.
The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
If I hit my finger with a hammer, I yell without any plan, so... the yell is its own cause? Who believes this nonsense? It fails the most elementary logic.
The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
> The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it.
This doesn't completely add up though. The current flavor of AI took 10-15 years of massive research and capital investment to be developed: Think of the effort of scraping most of the web for training data, then running hundreds of the most powerful GPUs available for a year for the pretraining, then paying thousands of workers to label the data for RLHF. There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies. ChatGPT was presented as a sort of open-ended tech demo with not even any specific purpose. Right now, tech companies are almost desperately shoving AI into about any existing product they can think of, usually for free and often even against the preferences of their users.
This doesn't look like a successful monetization strategy for me - if anything, AI looks like the world's most elaborate case of investor storytelling.
I don't want to rule out that they'll eventually find a business model for AI, but it seems weird to commit to a technology which requires this kind of extreme resource investment to be useful without having any idea what you actually want to do with it, once you have it.
This doesn't completely add up though. The current flavor of AI took 10-15 years of massive research and capital investment to be developed: Think of the effort of scraping most of the web for training data, then running hundreds of the most powerful GPUs available for a year for the pretraining, then paying thousands of workers to label the data for RLHF. There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies. ChatGPT was presented as a sort of open-ended tech demo with not even any specific purpose. Right now, tech companies are almost desperately shoving AI into about any existing product they can think of, usually for free and often even against the preferences of their users.
This doesn't look like a successful monetization strategy for me - if anything, AI looks like the world's most elaborate case of investor storytelling.
I don't want to rule out that they'll eventually find a business model for AI, but it seems weird to commit to a technology which requires this kind of extreme resource investment to be useful without having any idea what you actually want to do with it, once you have it.
> > The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
> There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Sure, but that's why the GP said "curiosity of researchers" and "the greed of corporations". They didn't claim it was mere scientific curiosity so this criticism of their argument does not hold.
> Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies.
The fact that people are bad at monetizing it doesn't negate the fact that expectations of future profit were a driving factor.
> There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Sure, but that's why the GP said "curiosity of researchers" and "the greed of corporations". They didn't claim it was mere scientific curiosity so this criticism of their argument does not hold.
> Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies.
The fact that people are bad at monetizing it doesn't negate the fact that expectations of future profit were a driving factor.
If you listen to most of them the use case is AGI. Once you get there the AGI robots can develop better robots exponentially and so produce an almost infinite amount of stuff. Subject to resources but still a lot.
If you have 10m you buy a boat, 100m an airplane, with friends you spend 10m on a party which is nothing? What fun products are there if the budget is many billions? The ones in endless pursuit of simply more money are mentally ill which is hard to ignore for the rest of the club. They try some immortality but then you have to stop living the good life. May try some mars colonization but it turns out the space bicycle isn't quite ready.
They do have to do something or else the reality catches up with them. The reality that you don't need that much wealth and that it might have been better if you took less from others. This post purchase rationalization also requires training your psychopathy (you cant let peoples suffering get to you or you have to pay to help them. You need to learn to ignore it.) Witch fits perfectly with the project described in the article.
They do have to do something or else the reality catches up with them. The reality that you don't need that much wealth and that it might have been better if you took less from others. This post purchase rationalization also requires training your psychopathy (you cant let peoples suffering get to you or you have to pay to help them. You need to learn to ignore it.) Witch fits perfectly with the project described in the article.
> What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
I think "Artificial Intelligence", as used by the author, has to be understood more broadly here. Artificial Intelligence isn't meant to be a placeholder for a tool like ChatGPT (a hammer), or for a plan like self-driving cars (a renovated home). I think it should be understood more like the faith in Artificial General Intelligence itself.
So the authors logic might be better understood in analogy to religious faith and its ritual of praying: A religious faith isn't the cause for a person to be praying - its the ritual of praying that "causes" (or "convinces") a person to be faithul to their religion.
EDIT:
Or, to paraphrase: The usefulness of Artificial Intelligence (AGI) isn't the cause to work on it - it's the work on it that convinces us of its usefulness.
I think "Artificial Intelligence", as used by the author, has to be understood more broadly here. Artificial Intelligence isn't meant to be a placeholder for a tool like ChatGPT (a hammer), or for a plan like self-driving cars (a renovated home). I think it should be understood more like the faith in Artificial General Intelligence itself.
So the authors logic might be better understood in analogy to religious faith and its ritual of praying: A religious faith isn't the cause for a person to be praying - its the ritual of praying that "causes" (or "convinces") a person to be faithul to their religion.
EDIT:
Or, to paraphrase: The usefulness of Artificial Intelligence (AGI) isn't the cause to work on it - it's the work on it that convinces us of its usefulness.
I don't think this is that complicated: the explanation of histrionic billionaires like sam altman for why AI is worth developing begs the question. The fact there are researchers not trying to justify AI development doesn't nullify this observation.
>hey chatGPT let's make an AI headline to grab attention and then spend 4000 words talking about US politics and tangential offshoots. Mention the philosophy of some niched internet celebrities for flavor.
This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
Wow what a timing with trump and btc, ada, sol, eth, ... as reserves oO ... #make_us_cyberpunk
https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBj...
https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBj...
Is that even English?
Excellent crit of Balajii https://open.substack.com/pub/davekarpf/p/the-tech-barons-ha...
It's not an excellent critique. I got a third of the way through and he's done nothing but reference The Office, posted gifs that are supposed to make the reader think he is smart and Balajii is dumb, and insisted that Balajii isn't smart enough to see the problems with his own theory.
> Peter Thiel stated this as early as 2009, in a lecture for a libertarian-oriented think tank:
> “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. (…)
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
Is this a common stance so called libertarians take now? That personal freedom eventually entails eating everyone else’s?
I guess I get why it’s popular for wanna be oligarchs. But I don’t see why anyone else would be in favor of it. Designing political systems to benefit yourself almost exclusively is pretty shallow on the intellectual scale.
> “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. (…)
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
Is this a common stance so called libertarians take now? That personal freedom eventually entails eating everyone else’s?
I guess I get why it’s popular for wanna be oligarchs. But I don’t see why anyone else would be in favor of it. Designing political systems to benefit yourself almost exclusively is pretty shallow on the intellectual scale.
I think what Thiel was getting at is the libertarian idea of being able to get a bit of land, farm for food etc. without the government getting in your face doesn't work in democracies because people will vote in laws taking your stuff to give to some causes elsewhere. Which is sort of true.
I don't really agree with the “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron bit though as capitalism is still capitalism even if you have to pay taxes and follow some regulations.
I don't really agree with the “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron bit though as capitalism is still capitalism even if you have to pay taxes and follow some regulations.
This is insane town people. This will result in a total dystopia.
Anti-Ichthys? I can't ignore the feeling of really dark vibes coming from all this turbo-capitalism or AI cyberland, whatever you call it. If this batch of turbo-capitalists get hands on real AI, we'll end in a high-tech concentration camp in a matter of decades. We'll have blockchain and inalienable rights to custom emoticons (from a pre-approved collection), but also metrics that guide our daily lives, performance reviews and corporate offsites in reeducation camps where we'll have to repeat that machines are also humans.
We are ruled by the stupidest people.
It’s crazy how aligned history is right now to support the rise of an AI Monarch in the United States. We have a president with a cultish base, but he’s old and there is no real heir to his following. AI tech has been advancing rapidly and some people practically worship AI like if it’s some all knowing god. The President has also surrounded himself with tech leaders like Elon Musk who have some very radical ideas.
You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.
You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.
Nick's entire shtick is based on the world having been under AI leadership for a good long while before the marketing term "AI" was introduced in the 1950s. In this model, the current crop of LLMs are more of a performance breakthrough made possible by the accumulation of political-technological power; but qualitatively, we haven't progressed that far past what McLuhan described. Another more credible author who I recently discovered subscribes to a similar model is Stross.
Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance.
(EDIT: tenses make me tense)
Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance.
(EDIT: tenses make me tense)
> Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.
Lorem ipsum as produced by the inmates of an asylum.
Lorem ipsum as produced by the inmates of an asylum.
The important thing here is the hyphenlessness of the word technocapital. While Marc Andreessen is using techno-capital in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Land's hyphenless technocapital points to his main thesis that capitalism and AI are (teleologically) identical. [0]
[0] https://retrochronic.com/
[0] https://retrochronic.com/
...that asylum's name was Planet Earth.
"It could only occur to an Ork to pull the wool over the eyes of the person he was talking to by speaking in a sophisticated and abstruse way – humans simulated simplicity for that. When anyone spoke to them in a complicated manner, they simply stopped listening, just as no one listened to the Orkish countess in the snuff as she shuddered from the jolting blows against her pelvic bone."
"It could only occur to an Ork to pull the wool over the eyes of the person he was talking to by speaking in a sophisticated and abstruse way – humans simulated simplicity for that. When anyone spoke to them in a complicated manner, they simply stopped listening, just as no one listened to the Orkish countess in the snuff as she shuddered from the jolting blows against her pelvic bone."
AI already installed trump
trump was the last in the primaries, until the algorithms selecting content to display for maximum engagement (keeping you glued to facebook so see ads) noticed that videos of trump result in massively increased viewer engagement
billions of dollars in AI supplied and free publicity later, he's running the US
we're already there
trump was the last in the primaries, until the algorithms selecting content to display for maximum engagement (keeping you glued to facebook so see ads) noticed that videos of trump result in massively increased viewer engagement
billions of dollars in AI supplied and free publicity later, he's running the US
we're already there
Sounds like something straight out of Revelations. Add another thing best not to emulate after books like 1984, Brave New World etc.
Those are now playbooks on how to build the next iteration of American society.
Read "Left Beyond Quest", it's very relevant.
Fortunately, it's only been a month and his approval rating is already plummeting. I doubt him proclaiming himself "Eternal Sovereign of America" would bode well with Americans, but who knows. His true fans seem completely oblivious to the insanity of what he does.
47.9% approval, 47.2% disapproval[0]. I don't see a plummet on this aggregate and he's still got net approval.
[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...
[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...
I've seen different polls, in which disapproval is slightly higher than approval, but anyways, we're still supposed to be in the honey moon period. And even your polls show a dip. We'll see.
1 month time out of 4 years is not really representative, by any statistical means. And as pointed out in the article, controlling information and removing anything which stands in between is key to success:
> Bureaucracy and the press are two entities of the “Cathedral” that, in the new vision, obstruct accelerationism. If these elements disappear (or are totally discredited), it will very likely be the turn of the universities and NGOs.
> All these institutions are considered outdated, and there will be attempts to replace or reinvent them with parallel institutions that use more Artificial Intelligence, and are run like private companies.
> Bureaucracy and the press are two entities of the “Cathedral” that, in the new vision, obstruct accelerationism. If these elements disappear (or are totally discredited), it will very likely be the turn of the universities and NGOs.
> All these institutions are considered outdated, and there will be attempts to replace or reinvent them with parallel institutions that use more Artificial Intelligence, and are run like private companies.
Yes, I can only hope this first month is the start of a lasting trend. Also, controlling the media can only do so much to mask material reality, if things get really dire really quickly.
[deleted]
> “I believe that voting is providing a sort of pornographic stimulus; it becomes more like supporting your football team.
Could someone explain how purple states, or purple voters, exist if that’s truly how people think? I worry that the kind of pessimism displayed in the quote above ignores the truth, which is that people in democracies care about the topics, do their research, and vote accordingly. I agree, however, that those on political extremes exhibit the kind of behavior described in the quote above.
The act of voting has always been about ensuring that the power structures favor one’s ability to live and thrive, whatever that means. It’s often just efficient for individuals to choose a party to support because there are too many demands on their attention. So, while some voting behavior may appear to be “supporting a football team”, it’s merely a rational act at an individual level.
> Nick Land believes that the Western ideological system, called “the Cathedral,” which includes state administration, universities, the press, and NGOs, functions as an immanent religion—a progressive religion that subdues and punishes any contrary opinion.
He’s not wrong, but the above is just an extension of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is self-evident from any serious observation of group behaviors. Land was just unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time and place, which is why his ideas were “nonconformist”. But is progressivism a unique property of Western thought? I think some pre-colonial societies could be described as more progressive than Athens. From what I can tell, the Cathedral is useful for organizing socioeconomic activity for the benefit of the elites, which sometimes includes a guise of multiculturalism to downplay harmful competitive behaviors which arise due to inter-group differences. I guess it’s true that if the elites don’t need cohesive social fabrics to maintain economic activities, then there’s no inherent need for managing primal impulses through higher ideals. But I think the folly here is forgetting that this relative social cohesiveness lets the elites exist without being molested or bothered, including by elites in non-Western societies, but I digress.
I don’t think Land’s problem is the Cathedral per se, instead Land’s problem is what he believes is ignorance, obfuscation, or outright subversion of the truth, or what he believes to be “the truth”. The core problem is the belief that some truth is being distorted or disregarded for any reason, whether it’s a self-serving or altruistic one. In fact, our biases convince us that what we believe is necessarily the truth. The human mind wants to conduct objective analysis, but it utterly fails at it, which is why truth-seeking is better off as a group effort.
> “My prediction for 2050 is that many nation-states may fail — financially, politically, militarily, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
> Conversely, small communities (often called ‘city states’) will be in control of their own prosperity, with citizenship as ownership. The citizens of these local communities will evenly share responsibility for the GDP that will drive the city states’ market capitalization.”
People didn’t have blockchain then, but the small-scale economies used to exist before cities and states emerged. My guess is that the Accelerationists will relearn the lessons of the ancients, and the city states will coalesce into nation states once more for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and security. The problem, then, is this—how is this Futurism? Maybe I am biased to think of “future” and “progress” as something which learns from the lessons of the past to improve an existing current state (so that it’s prepared for prolonged stability). The city state model is intriguing, I am not sure what to make of it without seeing it in action. But I think the only law in city states will be the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the entrenched elite are fooling themselves if they think no one else will play the game better than them. The inconvenient truth is that the niceties of the Cathedral protect everyone, including the elite.
Regarding the religious—I feel bad for them. Some people are born without the ability to question the ideas their parents imprint into them. It must really suck to have to belong to a group (the religious) that doesn’t have any objective way to justify its beliefs, so I understand why they think that “the world must be destroyed” to justify their sunk costs. My only gripe is that AI is being tarnished in all of this. I also dislike this false narrative that there is indeed some kind of Judeo-Christian fraternity. Sadly, I’ve seen enough of the world fucked by realpolitiks to say that there is no such thing, and it’s inherently dangerous to believe in such ideas.
Here’s what I believe—There’s no God, but God is not dead as long as his people exist. God is best thought of as a philosophical framework because ultimately man created God, an ideal to which he wants to aspire. Man created the idea of an objectively moral and ethical superior being, and gave himself the property of being created in the image of that being. So, now the burden is this: God (via man) created man in his image, and man must now create the world in God’s image, and the world should be beautiful—that is its birthright. There’s a lot there to unpack, but I think I’ll leave it up to the readers to take what they want from it because I favor free will. As far as I can tell, and maybe I am just foolish, but free will is God’s will.
Could someone explain how purple states, or purple voters, exist if that’s truly how people think? I worry that the kind of pessimism displayed in the quote above ignores the truth, which is that people in democracies care about the topics, do their research, and vote accordingly. I agree, however, that those on political extremes exhibit the kind of behavior described in the quote above.
The act of voting has always been about ensuring that the power structures favor one’s ability to live and thrive, whatever that means. It’s often just efficient for individuals to choose a party to support because there are too many demands on their attention. So, while some voting behavior may appear to be “supporting a football team”, it’s merely a rational act at an individual level.
> Nick Land believes that the Western ideological system, called “the Cathedral,” which includes state administration, universities, the press, and NGOs, functions as an immanent religion—a progressive religion that subdues and punishes any contrary opinion.
He’s not wrong, but the above is just an extension of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is self-evident from any serious observation of group behaviors. Land was just unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time and place, which is why his ideas were “nonconformist”. But is progressivism a unique property of Western thought? I think some pre-colonial societies could be described as more progressive than Athens. From what I can tell, the Cathedral is useful for organizing socioeconomic activity for the benefit of the elites, which sometimes includes a guise of multiculturalism to downplay harmful competitive behaviors which arise due to inter-group differences. I guess it’s true that if the elites don’t need cohesive social fabrics to maintain economic activities, then there’s no inherent need for managing primal impulses through higher ideals. But I think the folly here is forgetting that this relative social cohesiveness lets the elites exist without being molested or bothered, including by elites in non-Western societies, but I digress.
I don’t think Land’s problem is the Cathedral per se, instead Land’s problem is what he believes is ignorance, obfuscation, or outright subversion of the truth, or what he believes to be “the truth”. The core problem is the belief that some truth is being distorted or disregarded for any reason, whether it’s a self-serving or altruistic one. In fact, our biases convince us that what we believe is necessarily the truth. The human mind wants to conduct objective analysis, but it utterly fails at it, which is why truth-seeking is better off as a group effort.
> “My prediction for 2050 is that many nation-states may fail — financially, politically, militarily, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
> Conversely, small communities (often called ‘city states’) will be in control of their own prosperity, with citizenship as ownership. The citizens of these local communities will evenly share responsibility for the GDP that will drive the city states’ market capitalization.”
People didn’t have blockchain then, but the small-scale economies used to exist before cities and states emerged. My guess is that the Accelerationists will relearn the lessons of the ancients, and the city states will coalesce into nation states once more for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and security. The problem, then, is this—how is this Futurism? Maybe I am biased to think of “future” and “progress” as something which learns from the lessons of the past to improve an existing current state (so that it’s prepared for prolonged stability). The city state model is intriguing, I am not sure what to make of it without seeing it in action. But I think the only law in city states will be the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the entrenched elite are fooling themselves if they think no one else will play the game better than them. The inconvenient truth is that the niceties of the Cathedral protect everyone, including the elite.
Regarding the religious—I feel bad for them. Some people are born without the ability to question the ideas their parents imprint into them. It must really suck to have to belong to a group (the religious) that doesn’t have any objective way to justify its beliefs, so I understand why they think that “the world must be destroyed” to justify their sunk costs. My only gripe is that AI is being tarnished in all of this. I also dislike this false narrative that there is indeed some kind of Judeo-Christian fraternity. Sadly, I’ve seen enough of the world fucked by realpolitiks to say that there is no such thing, and it’s inherently dangerous to believe in such ideas.
Here’s what I believe—There’s no God, but God is not dead as long as his people exist. God is best thought of as a philosophical framework because ultimately man created God, an ideal to which he wants to aspire. Man created the idea of an objectively moral and ethical superior being, and gave himself the property of being created in the image of that being. So, now the burden is this: God (via man) created man in his image, and man must now create the world in God’s image, and the world should be beautiful—that is its birthright. There’s a lot there to unpack, but I think I’ll leave it up to the readers to take what they want from it because I favor free will. As far as I can tell, and maybe I am just foolish, but free will is God’s will.
Empires collapse. States do too. NRx wants a philosopher-king from a tradition that believed in cyclical power structures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
Meanwhile, the open question is whether or how much AI will kill humanity. No one questions how AI will compete against and govern itself; they just assume it'll be more capitalism!
Meanwhile, the open question is whether or how much AI will kill humanity. No one questions how AI will compete against and govern itself; they just assume it'll be more capitalism!
CEOs are monarch-like. Businesses are not democratic. Is it surprising that modern atheist, possibly sociopathic, business CEOs would consider this a path to follow?
So another name for it is Longtermism (successor of effective altruism)!?
It's a good overview of the ideological movements that have been happening in these spaces for some time. He makes some confused attempt to reconcile it with religious extremism at the end that doesn't work. There are already cleavages between Trump's evangelical base and the crowd surrounding Thiel.
In 2015, right wing politics was being discussed among three chief groups: the techno-commercialists, the ethno-nationalists, and theonomists. You may still be able to find a Venn diagram describing these groups if you look for it, but to make a long story short, Trump was seen by many (though not all) popular figures in these groups as a unifying figure who could deliver on what everyone wanted. These groups were never wholly unified in what they wanted: Techno-commercialists were mostly anarcho-capitalists during this period and tended to not want the sorts of restrictions on immigration that the nationalists wanted. Theonomists tended to be interested in the salvation of everyone and thus couldn't limit themselves to capitalism or nationalism if these ideologies were found to conflict with their religion. These differences were set aside because there was a feeling that anything had to be better than the culture war issues that were going on at the end of Obama's second term.
When Trump began campaigning for the 2024 election, the cleavages became far more pronounced as groups became concerned with what messaging would be most effective. Theonomists were pushed out (largely by techno-commercialists) due to the feeling that religious overtones would be unpalatable to the average voter. Theonomists largely seem to have exited the stage in terms of their influence. I am aware of one that is building a town, but his interests seem to have shifted towards ethno-nationalism.
The techno-commercialists are everywhere now and largely seem to have won out over the nationalists and the theonomists. Blake Masters is another prominent one from Thiel's network. If you follow these circles at all, it also seems like Thiel has probably also been paying stipends to influencers in the space. It would have been unimaginable in dissident spheres to run cover for Thiel 10 years ago because he is 1) a billionaire with ties to the military-industrial complex, 2) an immigrant, and 3) gay, but there is now quite an extensive network of users on Twitter who promote him. Most of these guys were Trump absolutists; they believed anyone who crossed Trump was assumed to be in the wrong, because Trump was seen as the only viable way forward. It seems like they were in the loop with regards to JD Vance and Elon Musk being brought into Trump's inner circle, because they rapidly became emphatic about both figures despite neither being particularly palatable to their audience (Musk wants to bring in more immigrants, Vance is married to an Indian woman and worked at at investment bank).
Great overview, though. I had the draft for an article like this kicking around but I guess there's no need to finish it now.
In 2015, right wing politics was being discussed among three chief groups: the techno-commercialists, the ethno-nationalists, and theonomists. You may still be able to find a Venn diagram describing these groups if you look for it, but to make a long story short, Trump was seen by many (though not all) popular figures in these groups as a unifying figure who could deliver on what everyone wanted. These groups were never wholly unified in what they wanted: Techno-commercialists were mostly anarcho-capitalists during this period and tended to not want the sorts of restrictions on immigration that the nationalists wanted. Theonomists tended to be interested in the salvation of everyone and thus couldn't limit themselves to capitalism or nationalism if these ideologies were found to conflict with their religion. These differences were set aside because there was a feeling that anything had to be better than the culture war issues that were going on at the end of Obama's second term.
When Trump began campaigning for the 2024 election, the cleavages became far more pronounced as groups became concerned with what messaging would be most effective. Theonomists were pushed out (largely by techno-commercialists) due to the feeling that religious overtones would be unpalatable to the average voter. Theonomists largely seem to have exited the stage in terms of their influence. I am aware of one that is building a town, but his interests seem to have shifted towards ethno-nationalism.
The techno-commercialists are everywhere now and largely seem to have won out over the nationalists and the theonomists. Blake Masters is another prominent one from Thiel's network. If you follow these circles at all, it also seems like Thiel has probably also been paying stipends to influencers in the space. It would have been unimaginable in dissident spheres to run cover for Thiel 10 years ago because he is 1) a billionaire with ties to the military-industrial complex, 2) an immigrant, and 3) gay, but there is now quite an extensive network of users on Twitter who promote him. Most of these guys were Trump absolutists; they believed anyone who crossed Trump was assumed to be in the wrong, because Trump was seen as the only viable way forward. It seems like they were in the loop with regards to JD Vance and Elon Musk being brought into Trump's inner circle, because they rapidly became emphatic about both figures despite neither being particularly palatable to their audience (Musk wants to bring in more immigrants, Vance is married to an Indian woman and worked at at investment bank).
Great overview, though. I had the draft for an article like this kicking around but I guess there's no need to finish it now.
tl;dr: AI and capitalism are both cancers, existing for no reason other than to further propagate themselves; hegemonistic. And Thiel is a cancer-causing agent.
I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
gradus_ad(3)
A.I Monarchy unironically better because AI wouldn't corrupt
Yes, because an actual A.I. would somehow be free of biases and magically tend towards justice somehow.
Like any actual intelligence.
It would maybe be better than normal monarchy in most ways, I guess.
Other than that AI doesn’t die. The best thing a king can do is die, because monarchy is terrible.
Other than that AI doesn’t die. The best thing a king can do is die, because monarchy is terrible.
If there was AI made for public benefit, maybe yeah. But for now AIs are made by companies and governments and they're trying their best to encode their interests into them.
[deleted]
The last paragraph of Animal Farm by George Orwell reads:
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
My take:
Democrat and republican party are two sides of the same coin!
The parties shift, the faces change, but the game remains the same. Battles are waged in public, deals are made in private. Power is the prize, and blind loyalty is the sacrifice.
Allegiance is demanded, division is fueled. One side painted as righteous, the other as corrupt.
But no more! No more blind devotion. No more politics as theater while lives hang in the balance.
Judge not by party, nor by word but by action and how it affects you.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
My take:
Democrat and republican party are two sides of the same coin!
The parties shift, the faces change, but the game remains the same. Battles are waged in public, deals are made in private. Power is the prize, and blind loyalty is the sacrifice.
Allegiance is demanded, division is fueled. One side painted as righteous, the other as corrupt.
But no more! No more blind devotion. No more politics as theater while lives hang in the balance.
Judge not by party, nor by word but by action and how it affects you.
Grown weary of the false equivalence here. No, a party that does not decry Nazis salutes is not the other side of the coin.
Sorry, is that all you have going for the Democrats? The Republicans might be worse, but they can both still be worth opposing.
I don't like the Republican Party and much prefer the Democratic Party because of the Republicans':
Nazi salutes.
Reckless incompetence shutting down services without understanding they are or do.
Supporting an invading regime over the people who were invaded.
Abandoning our European allies.
Threatening to annex/occupy countries and neighbors.
First firing the inspectors general that provide oversight.
Pretending like they were going to lower grocery prices but are now more focused on trade wars and fantasizing about a Trump hotel in Gaza.
Would you like me to continue?
Nazi salutes.
Reckless incompetence shutting down services without understanding they are or do.
Supporting an invading regime over the people who were invaded.
Abandoning our European allies.
Threatening to annex/occupy countries and neighbors.
First firing the inspectors general that provide oversight.
Pretending like they were going to lower grocery prices but are now more focused on trade wars and fantasizing about a Trump hotel in Gaza.
Would you like me to continue?
That’s how a lot of moderates feel apparently, which is how Trump was able to win. I guess we’ll find out if we even have parties (or a country) in 2028.
I feel like political discourse would not be in the state it currently is if it wasn’t boiled down to a facile comparison between good (the party you support) and evil (the party you don’t support) and that, ultimately, neither of them succeed without being in collusion.
It’s very much a false dichotomy based on Hollywood superhero slop.
It’s very much a false dichotomy based on Hollywood superhero slop.
Yeah, no. Knee jerk both sides are the same was how republican actions and goals get euphemism away while democrats faults are exaggerated.
Systematically. There is no symmetry here.
Systematically. There is no symmetry here.