gom_jabbar

AI is potentially the philosophical rupture as it might entail the automation of philosophy itself. As Nick Land put it in footnote 6 of Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy:

  The techonomic horizon, for 'us', coincides with the impending crisis of historically-actualized artificial intelligence. Encapsulated within this by now manifest potential is the comprehensive automation of philosophy. [0]

AI also fundamentally challenges human identity:

  The Human Security System is structured by delusion. What's being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it's the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it's not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it's rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can't be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence. [1]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#crypto-current-footnote-6

[1] https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-...

That why it's ironic that some techno-optimists have embraced Nick Land's philosophy, given that his work fundamentally challenges their core assumptions:

  Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ...
  
  Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#meltdown

Yes, and Accelerationism predicted this development back in the 1990s, perhaps most prominently in the opening lines of Nick Land's Meltdown (1994) text:

  [[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

> reasoning models which do AI research

In the introduction to my research project on Accelerationism [0], I write:

  Faced with the acceleration of progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) — with AI agents now automating AI research and development —, Accelerationism no longer seems like an abstract philosophy producing empty hyperstitional hype, but like a sober description of reality. The failed 2023 memorandum to stop AI development on systems more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 perfectly illustrates the phenomenological aspects of Accelerationism: "To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon." [1]

At the current rate of acceleration, if you don't write hyperstitionally, your texts are dead on arrival.

[0] https://retrochronic.com/

[1] Nick Land (2017). A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism in Jacobite Magazine.

Correct, for Nick Land "Business ventures are actually existing artificial intelligences"[0] and the failure cases will increase with the ongoing autonomization of capital and eventually the concept of "capital self-ownership"[1] will have to be recognized.

[0] Nick Land (2014). Odds and Ends in Collapse Volume VIII: Casino Real. p. 372.

[1] https://retrochronic.com/#piketty

I think it not only feels bleak, but that it (that capitalism is an it is important to Nick Land from the perspective of complex adaptive systems) is just realistic.

I have a research project on Nick Land's core thesis that capitalism is AI. If you want to go ultra-deep into his theory, check it out: https://retrochronic.com/

It's fundamental to understand that capital is not just teleological - converging with AI on the event horizon of the Singularity - but teleoplexic (i.e. "capitalism takes on a mind of its own and becomes autonomous").

I think late stage capitalism is an imprecise term - it does not capture the fundamental decoupling process - for what Nick Land has called "escape-phase capital autonomization" [0].

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#great-decoupling

Hype is very interesting. The concept of Hyperstition describes fictions that make themselves real. In this sense, hype is an essential part of capitalism:

"Capitalization is [...] indistinguishable from a commercialization of potentials, through which modern history is slanted (teleoplexically) in the direction of ever greater virtualization, operationalizing science fiction scenarios as integral components of production systems." [0]

"Within capitalist futures markets, the non-actual has effective currency. It is not an "imaginary" but an integral part of the virtual body of capital, an operationalized realization of the future." [1]

This corresponds to the idea that virtual is opposed to actual, not real.

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#teleoplexy-12

[1] https://retrochronic.com/#on-accelerate-2b

Working with Svelte 5 and LLMs is a real nightmare.

AI agents are really interesting. Fundamentally they may represent a step toward the autonomization of capital, potentially disrupting "traditional legal definitions of personhood, agency, and property" [0] and leading to the need to recognize "capital self-ownership" [1].

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#teleoplexy-17

[1] https://retrochronic.com/#piketty

I'm continuing my deep dive into Nick Land's main thesis that capitalism is AI. [0]

I've recently started adding sources that exist only in image form, such as Nick Land's Shorelines text, which, like Machinic Desire, contains the famous passage:

"What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

I'm currently transcribing his latest 3-hour interview and extracting the bits that relate to his core thesis.

[0] https://retrochronic.com/

Anxiety and sadness are actually mild emotional responses to the dissolution of human culture. Nick Land in 1992:

"It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into 'dehumanized landscapes ... emptied spaces' where human culture will be dissolved. Just as the capitalist urbanization of labour abstracted it in a parallel escalation with technical machines, so will intelligence be transplanted into the purring data zones of new software worlds in order to be abstracted from an increasingly obsolescent anthropoid particularity, and thus to venture beyond modernity. Human brains are to thinking what mediaeval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and parochial places to be.

[...]

Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem." [0]

Land is being ostracized for some of his provocations, but it seems pretty clear by now that we are in the Landian Accelerationism timeline. Engaging with his thought is crucial to understanding what is happening with AI, and what is still largely unseen, such as the autonomization of capital.

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#circuitries

Sure, humanity has its ways of objecting Accelerationism, but the process fundamentally challenges human identity:

"The Human Security System is structured by delusion. What's being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it's the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it's not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it's rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can't be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence." [0]

See also my research project on the core thesis of Accelerationism that capitalism is AI. [1]

[0] https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-...

[1] https://retrochronic.com/

I think it would have been important to note that Nick Land was initially on board with D&G's vision, but later departed from it based on his changed understanding of capitalism. As Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier write in their introduction to Fanged Noumena:

"From Land's initial characterisation of the revolutionary task as one of pushing capitalism to the point of its auto-dissolution via the complete dis-inhibition of productive synthesis — a dis-inhibition announcing the convergence of social production and cosmic schizophrenia proclaimed in Anti-Oedipus — we arrive at the blunt admission that there is no foreseeable 'beyond' to the 'infinite' expansion of capitalism (since capitalism is 'beyondness' as such)." [0]

For a more nuanced picture of the concept of Accelerationism and its evolution in Land's thought, see my research project. [1]

[0] Robin Mackay & Ray Brassier (2011). Editor's Introduction in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 47.

[1] https://retrochronic.com/

Nietzsche is on the list, but Nick Land's Fanged Noumena is clearly missing. As Mark Fisher has written about Land's work:

"There was a great deal of cyber-theory around in the 1990s but none of it seemed to come from inside the machines – which is to say, outside us – in the way that Land's did." [0]

[0] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/...

I think focusing on Nick Land's provocations rather than confronting the predictive validity of Accelerationism, which the Guardian article highlights, is just a nice coping strategy for people who are low on decoupling.

I'm doing a primary literature review of Land's core thesis that AI and capitalism are teleologically identical at https://retrochronic.com/ and I hope it will show that there is at least some substance to his work, such as his perspective on AI in the context of capital autonomization.

For a detailed discussion of retrocausality in Nick Land's work, check out the https://retrochronic.com/ introduction. There's even a dedicated Terminator section.

Nick Land interprets Roko's Basilisk as "retrochronic AI infiltration".

Deepening the primary literature review for Nick Land's thesis that AI and capitalism are teleologically identical at https://retrochronic.com/

Here's a primary literature review on Nick Land's thesis that AI and capitalism are teleologically identical and will converge on the event horizon of the techno-economic singularity.

It's AI hype to the max.

https://retrochronic.com/

The eternal return of the same :)

Event Horizon

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/block-website... works for me. Of course there are similar extensions out there.

If I find that websites are taking too much time and pulling my focus, I use an extension to block the sites and enter a password to open them.

In many cases, while entering the password, I can think about whether it's really necessary to open the site, such as YouTube or my local newspaper's page.

This has helped me a lot to not go into the rabbit hole.

Sorry, I had to clarify that the final decision has not yet been made. The city still approves digital billboards [0].

In Geneva, the debate has been going on for some time. There, I think since 2021, digital billboards should be banned, but in the latest votes there is the counter-movement to keep the billboards [1].

-

[0]: https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/hbd/de/index/bewilligungen_und_...

[1]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/geneva-throws-out-ban-...

In Zurich, the ban against billboards was recently introduced as well.

It reminds me of the discussion of ad blockers on websites like Youtube and Co. After all, advertising is actually a fundamental part of the economy.

How are things in Sao Paolo 10 years later?