The A.I. Monarchy
substack.com
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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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
People bought into far right populism, what’s new ?
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Standardization is useful for scaling.
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.
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. :)
Does that sound optimistic?
- Peter Thiel - The Atlantic 2023Yeah he's been out there in plain sight for a decade plus.
Dystopian fiction doesn't have a great track record for prediction.
I wonder what great aesthetic and fiction we'll get from Trumpism?
It was a time of wars and economic turmoil.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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 :)
Some will rob you with a six gun. Some with a fountain pen.
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.
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?
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.
The catch is that today we are literally living what Karl Marx predicted to the letter.
It's much easier to criticize than to build or fix.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Innovations like blockchains and LLMs might finally enable us to develop such a system.
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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
The world is watching and the USA is failing. It won’t be long.
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.
The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
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.
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.
Affulenza is real. These guys are brain-damaged.
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.
Makes me think that, as with SciFi dystopias, they took LOTR as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale.
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.
This guy thinks nature doesn’t “work”
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.
I doubt Kurzweil is a billionaire as well.
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 also got filtered by Land, though, so take that for what it's worth.
Even the magnates should figure out it is not going to help them. Which is why they actually move slow.
"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)
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
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! ;)
Bad form.
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.
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!
> 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
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futu...
in short, this substack article share by op is probably just ai generated slop
Which is of course nothing new, but it does make me remember it.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
I do not think we are everywhere near self-sufficient robotics.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
There's a lot more logistical options for them these days. You'd only catch them if they made a serious blunder.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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
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.
"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]
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)
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.
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!
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."
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 :)
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...
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).
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.
It contains (almost) all primary sources for his thesis (182 as of this writing).
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.
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.
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.
"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]
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of words boiling down to "clickbait".
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.
Is that true? Democrats are pretty centrist by non-American standards.
Nonsense Republican propaganda with no basis in reality.
Single-payer healthcare and decent labor laws won’t make the sky fall. Republican BS.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBj...
> “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 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.
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.
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)
Lorem ipsum as produced by the inmates of an asylum.
"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."
[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...
> 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.
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
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.
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!
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.
I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
Other than that AI doesn’t die. The best thing a king can do is die, because monarchy is terrible.
"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.
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?
Systematically. There is no symmetry here.
It’s very much a false dichotomy based on Hollywood superhero slop.