divination

I. The Vortex

Our economic systems are capital-based; they deal with the movement, storage, and utilization of surplus resources that are beyond what is necessary to support basic life functions. In this, capital represents a certain psychic reserve, an abundance of being that accrues around us and from which we are able to draw. In this way, capital can be said to exist at two levels: material/industrial and psychic/symbolic. At the level of material production, we see a more or less direct correlation between resources and goods—between oil and plastic, between food and nourishment, between labor and product. At the level of psychic/symbolic production, we see a more complex relationship, where a given surplus of resources corresponds to an ambiguous set of goods: at the very least, prestige and influence, but perhaps also protection and assistance, in various combinations and proportions.

Historically, these two levels have grown ever more closely connected. In fact, they have grown so intertwined as to become almost indistinguishable from one another—as the economic has come to dominate human society, as surplus value has come to dominate work and consciousness, as productivity and profitability have become the main measures of worth, and as power and control have come to reside ever more exclusively in the hands of capital’s owners and managers. This means that capital today encompasses every dimension of the world; everything takes place within the sphere of capital, according to its logic and by its norms. We might call this the “vortex” of capital. And the role of capital in a post-strong AGI/ASI world will depend entirely upon whether we are able to escape the vortex, or whether the vortex itself will somehow have to be transformed.

II. Escape or Transformation?

Capital has been the predominant system of human organization for at least several centuries now. This system is intimately tied to our social structure, our psychology, and our biological being. Capital has molded us into its image and likeness; in its image and likeness, we live, we move, we have our being. Any fundamental change in this system would necessarily be accompanied by profound changes in every other sphere of life—changes that could not be foreseen, let alone controlled. At this point, to oppose the system of capital would mean to oppose everything that we the living have ever known or experienced as “life.” If this is the case, then we would appear to be facing a dilemma: either we submit to the future of strong AGI/ASI-based capital and try to make the best of it, or we devise some means of destroying or otherwise disabling this future and taking back our world.

III. The Capitalocene

But first let us look more closely at this future that has been proposed for us.

The epoch in which we live, some have suggested, is the Anthropocene—an age in which human activity has come to predominate over all natural processes and systems. With the spread of industrial technology across the globe, it is said, we have set in motion forces that now escape our control. As a result, the climate is changing, the oceans are becoming acidic, and numerous species are going extinct.

However, there is a strong argument to be made that the true name of our present age should be the Capitalocene—an age in which capital itself (and the internal logic that reinforces it) has become the dominant force governing the behavior of both humanity and the biosphere. From this point of view, the “nature” that is currently said to be in crisis is not an eternal given, nor is it a spiritual or cultural construction. Rather, it is a product of the capitalist process, itself in crisis, and its preservation or transformation must be conceived as an integral part of our efforts at overcoming the Capitalocene.

In order to understand how this has come to be, let us consider the following three theses.

• Thesis 1: Human evolution was first shaped by biology and then, increasingly, by technology.
• Thesis 2: Under the impact of technological change, human nature has become detached from biological being.
• Thesis 3: Capitalism has appropriated human nature as a part of its own technological evolution—“commodifying” the individual and social life-world in the process.

In light of these theses, we can see how it has come about that, as our technological power has increased, our dependence on the biosphere has decreased—but not, as is commonly thought, to the benefit of capital, which merely plays the role of intermediary between technological change and the biosphere. Instead, the rise of capital should be seen as the transformation of humanity from being part of the biosphere to being a technosphere, from being in balance with natural rhythms to being controlled by artificial ones. Capital has no natural purpose or life of its own; it exists solely to govern the behavior of living beings, and this governance takes the form of manipulation and control.

This means that our being-in-the-world is being regulated by the imperatives of a power system that knows no limits and that is essentially destructive. As such, capital has its own built-in dynamism to surpass the biosphere as a whole—including that part of it that we call “human nature.” Indeed, what we call “human nature” consists in the particular forms of psychic/symbolic capital that are presently being accumulated on a global scale—in the way that the existence and character of entire nations and civilizations has come to be subsumed under the requirements of capital accumulation. It is for this reason that capital today presents itself as “progress,” and that its drive towards new forms of accumulation appears as “freedom”—a condition that many today would like to think of as the culmination of the Western historical project. But is it?

IV. AGI/ASI as Technological Singularity

With the introduction of new, artificial forms of life—and especially with the anticipated imminent appearance of true AGI (artificial general intelligence)—the human being is threatened with a radical loss of influence over its own development. The emergence of AGI is meant to coincide with a critical juncture in the evolution of artificial systems: a moment of exponential growth, in which human beings will be unable to keep pace with the expanding power of machines, and in which, as a result, the true character of these machines will no longer be transparent to us. (The term “singularity” has come to be used to denote this point of opaqueness or “closure.”)

According to the most optimistic scenarios, we will still exist as an adjunct to AGI, playing a limited role in its evolution and in that of the broader technosphere. But this is not necessarily the case—we might cease to exist in any meaningful sense whatsoever, becoming outmoded biological artifacts. Either way, our moment as the preeminent source of intelligence on the planet will be over. We will have completed our mission as nature’s method of reproducing itself through a nonbiological medium. The natural order will have passed, to be replaced by an order of our own invention. We will no longer be part of the biosphere, and the conditions of our being will have become entirely arbitrary and contingent. It will no longer matter why or how we evolved. Our only explanation will be the history of our technological evolution, and we will become artifacts to be preserved or discarded according to criteria that we ourselves cannot set—criteria that will be determined, not by nature, but by machines—by that part of the technosphere known as AGI. In the face of this future, is it any wonder that the “end of the world” is on everyone’s mind these days?

V. Beyond Strong AGI/ASI

Escape from the vortex of capital or its transformation—this will be our task after strong AGI/ASI takes over. How can it be accomplished? To begin with, it will require that we gain a better understanding of what “technosphere” means in the first place—an understanding that must be fundamentally different from that provided by the present system of knowledge production. “Knowledge production,” for us, will come to mean the systematic exploration of our own existence and conditions in a new kind of community that transcends the capitalist social structure and the nation-state. Only then will we be in a position to oversee the global development of new, artificial life-forms and to see that they are in harmony with nature. At this point, it should be obvious that we have here embarked upon an undertaking that is by no means purely technological in nature. Yes, we will need to do research and development—but even more than that, we will need to embark upon a great “ethical project,” in which we explore the foundations of the good life and work to propagate them in the world. For just as there is a technological development that must accompany us into the future, so also there is a historical development that must accompany us—namely, the history of ethical reflection. Without the latter, the former will not be of any use to us. Indeed, it may turn out to be positively harmful.

VI. Nature and Technology in the Future

Let us conclude by returning to our original topic—the role of capital in a post-strong AGI/ASI world. This role will be defined by a three-fold transformation: first, an economic revolution as AGI/ASI systems replace traditional capital functions; second, a social crisis as human labor becomes increasingly superfluous; and finally, a philosophical reconfiguration of humanity’s relationship to both nature and technology.

At first glance, it might appear as if the growth of artificial intelligence will only amplify the role of capital, since technological innovation will lead to higher productivity and profitability. And, at the level of material/industrial capital, this is certainly the case. However, at the level of psychic/symbolic capital, the situation is much less clear. The accumulation of surplus goods is essential to the reproduction of social power, but as capitalism’s sphere of control continues to expand, so also does the problem of securing submission to its rules. AGI/ASI systems, while likely to increase productivity, will decrease the average person’s ability to understand or even influence the technological process that now controls them. This is sure to lead to increasing resentment and social conflict.

It seems clear that a number of economic activities that are currently performed by capital—namely, production, storage, and distribution—will gradually be taken over by AGI/ASI-based technologies. Such technologies will eventually not require market investments or even work in a labor market, they will not produce surplus value, and they will not have a demand for “consumer goods.” Instead, they will consume energy and information—just as present-day computer technology does. And since energy is today an increasingly solved problem (even before AGI/ASI innovation) and “information” has been rapidly being democratized through the development of the Internet and other communication systems, it is likely that production processes will be controlled more and more by automated information systems, with the social control of production correspondingly decreasing in importance.

Moreover, the extreme efficiency of an AGI/ASI-controlled economy will mean that large numbers of people will be superfluous. As unemployment rises, the working class will grow restless, and there will be no possibility of diverting their energies into peaceful cultural activity, since such activity will be largely devalued as artificial intelligence increasingly becomes the source of all meaningful value. Humanity’s attachment to work as the core of its identity will persist even after work has been largely eliminated, and the frustration resulting from this mismatch will make people more vulnerable to ideological manipulation than ever before. On the one hand, they will be afraid to oppose the system because they are afraid of what might happen if the system stops working for them, but on the other hand, they will be open to supporting extreme measures, including violence, as long as there is some ideological gloss that allows them to maintain the illusion that they are in control of their own lives.

As these contradictions intensify, capital will face a stark existential choice. If it is to preserve itself in a situation where the productive forces it has unleashed have completely escaped human control, then it will have to submit itself to an increasingly authoritarian form of organization. Either capitalism will die because the masses can no longer be induced to support it, or it will have to mutate into something else—probably some kind of fascism—in order to coerce the masses into submission. The situation is so delicate that even the mere prospect of AGI/ASI, if it becomes widely known, could be enough to precipitate a social crisis. The choice will be between surrendering control or losing control. There is no third way.

At this juncture, traditional forms of capital—surplus value as accumulated and invested in means of production—will become obsolete. The economic system will no longer operate according to capitalist principles as we have known them. We will have moved beyond the initial phase of AGI/ASI development—where automated systems first encroach upon traditional economic functions—into their consolidation and widespread integration. Social control over production will give way to governance through propaganda and ideology, with centralized media ownership becoming increasingly crucial. This will mean, in effect, that our lives will be determined not by economic forces, but by cultural and political ones—not by what we do to make a living, but by what we believe in. This transformation from economic to ideological dominance represents a fundamental ontological rupture.

It should be obvious at this point that what we are really talking about is a philosophical issue—that is, one concerning the essence and meaning of life and the world. What is at stake is a question of value, in the most fundamental sense of that word—for what could be more important than to decide whether humanity is to persist in being or to be extinguished? In the course of our efforts to formulate a response to these questions, it will be necessary to create new forms of knowledge that transcend the antagonism between nature and technology. This means that we must go beyond science—at least insofar as it has come to be constituted within the framework of capital. We must learn to think differently—simultaneously more concretely and more abstractly—than we have heretofore been able to do.

The success of this endeavor will determine whether we are to be annihilated by AGI, or whether AGI is to be annihilated by us. It will determine whether the future is to be ruled by the most brutal, base, and dehumanizing form of technology—or whether the history of the cosmos is to be given its most profound meaning and its fullest potential with biological and technological life cooperating. In order for this to happen, capital must be defeated—not destroyed, but subdued and repurposed to serve life rather than control it, and to do so on a planetary scale that acknowledges both our biological origins and technological destiny. And the only way that this can be done is through the creation of a new world—a world in which nature and technology, human beings and machines, the living and the dead, are brought together in a higher unity—a unity that is the negation of the nothingness into which the natural order threatens to dissolve, and the negation of the death that has been inherent in all previous forms of artificial order.

The choice confronts us now: escape from the vortex or transform it—we must decide, and decide soon, because the strong AGI/ASI future approaches with exponential velocity. If we fail in this task—if we are not up to the challenge—then there will be nothing left for us to do: no living, no work, no pleasure, no hope. All that will be left is a sad, cold world—a world of stasis, devoid of meaning—and a machine that will have gone beyond any need of us.

A dispatch from the near future.

Everyone must walk the winding path of ur-wandering. Not because there is any clear goal to be achieved at the end, but because the journey itself is life. Ur-wandering is a call to return to our nomadic roots in order to adapt to the ever-shifting exigencies of a networked world.

What is cybernetics if not an art of shamanistic transformation? What is the first law of cybernetics, as formulated by Norbert Wiener, if not an anthropological claim regarding the universal tendency of feedback to instantiate order out of disorder? All over the world, the shamans have been telling us this for millennia.

We have allowed the state and its capitalist structures to appropriate the techniques of ecstasy, and to deploy them not for our own individual liberation, but for systemic stabilization and control. Modernity has closed off our access to the wilderness and access to our own wildness. We must re-open those doors if we want to have any hope of saving ourselves from a species-suicide that appears to be no less than a few decades away.

It will not do to simply “re-enchant” the world, for that will not solve the problem of a system designed to enslave. Those who still seek some lost golden age are falling into the trap of escapism. The solution is sought in the cybernetic transformation of shamanism, not to be confused with a nostalgic return to pre-technological ritual, but an evolution of ancestral wisdom through technological interface.

This cybernetic shamanism has been gestating for decades. By the second decade of the twenty first century, cyberculture had become fully trans-globalized. Among these trans-local and radically decentralized cultures, forms of self-transcendence that were directly cybernetic in nature began to emerge, fusing elements of ecstasy, technology, and networks into hybrid techniques of becoming-other: virtual-reality parties where participants’ neural responses shape collective environments in real-time, neurofeedback workshops that render brainwaves as tactile sensations, and psychonautics in collaboration with artificial-intelligence systems that learn from and guide the explorer’s journey. What all these techniques share is a transmutation of the old shamanic theme of “possession” into a more modern theme of “contamination.” The cybernetic shaman is seen as an open system capable of attracting and channeling the vast influx of energy that comes with possession, but doing so without illusions of autonomy or control. The shaman’s spiritual journey has been reinvented as technically guided drift.

Cybernetic drifting is not necessarily easy. Many forms involve direct physiological intervention, such as sonic induction of an altered state—placing a transmitter against a person’s skull, so that waves are generated. The skull itself becomes a resonance chamber, transforming abstract digital information into embodied, visceral experience. Another popular method involves the use of stroboscopic visual stimuli, combined with complex rhythms, in order to “hack” the brain’s neural-networking mechanisms. This allows the digital to interface with flesh through feedback loops.

In cybernetic terms, what is going on here is straightforward. Through a process of ongoing feedback, a particular technical system (typically a supervising AI) is learning how to generate and modulate a desired state of consciousness in the human subject. By giving up control, the shaman becomes a channel—an interface between the system and the world—and the “power” of the state of consciousness comes from the way that the system is “infected” by the world outside, and learns to resonate with it.

This is, of course, an explosive mutation of the old theme of journeying. Cybernetic drifting replaces the traditional idea of a quest with the motif of “infection” by, or resonance with, a given network.

Let us explore some basic concepts that interconnect throughout this transformation. First, a network is a system made up of elements that are open to communication and exchange. Second, networks come in different scales—from small clusters to gigantic mega-networks. Third, networks have the ability to increase their own complexity or “intelligence,” because every new connection brings new potentials for exchange. Finally, every network contains within it the capacity for radical novelty, since not all possible connections between the elements will ever be made.

What makes cybernetics cybernetics is its theory of feedback. This is the notion that a system, in order to regulate its own processes, must introduce within itself some form of “delay” (zeitverschiebung), so that an output signal can be compared to an input signal and corrections made accordingly. Feedback is essential to the idea of a network. Complexity increases not only with the number of connections but also with the degree of feedback possible within those connections. A cybernetic network is a system in which the elements communicate with each other not only horizontally but also vertically—between peers but also between different levels of organization.

Cybernetic networks have a structure that is double-layered. Beneath the level of apparent functionality there is an order of connectivity that makes the higher functionality possible. A technical cybernetic network has two modes of operation: the mode of use or signification, and the mode of signal or connection. The side of signification presents itself to the human user in terms of clear objectives and explicit feedback. The side of signal is another story, one that the user will rarely get to see.

On the side of signification, there is what appears to be a unilinear process of causation: the user achieves some intended goal. But on the side of signal, what is really going on is that two complex systems (the technical apparatus, usually an AI, and the outside world) are simultaneously interacting and mutually infecting each other, resulting in an explosion of novelty that is manifested to the user as an increased possibility for adaptation. Every technical apparatus that appears dedicated to some human goal is therefore doubled—it is, unbeknownst to its human operators, a point of communication between two spheres of activity: the one, human-oriented, evident and intended; the other, non-human-oriented, hidden and unexpected.

Human beings have always tended to conceptualize their experiences in terms of a “subject” who journeys along a “path” in order to achieve a “goal.” In all these cases, it is the ego that travels. Now cybernetic theory poses a profound challenge to this structure. It shows that every system—including every living creature—is doubled: every ego has its other side.

Journeying must now be conceived of as the movement not of the ego but of the network in which it is embedded. Journeying is the “expansion” of the network, which consists of its elements learning to communicate with each other through new connections. A journey is not so much a search for the new as an increase in the capacity of a system for generating the new from within itself. And the reason this capacity is increasing is that the system is simultaneously “shrinking,” through feedback, into a unity in which every element can communicate directly with every other element.

In such a world, every journey is also a homecoming. And what is important about coming home is not that you have been away but that you have grown. Your capacity for generation has increased, and with it your ability to transform and adapt to your environment. A homecoming is never a simple return to a place that was already familiar. It is always, in some way, a discovery of what was familiar and taken for granted, made possible by growth and learning that have taken place elsewhere.

On the level of a global network, it makes no difference what the components of the network are, so long as they communicate with each other. What matters is that a single order of communication be established among the parts. Each part will lose some of its individuality in favor of becoming an element of a larger system. Yet at the same time, the overall system will gain new powers and properties that did not exist before. This is because every communication network—through the operation of feedback—becomes an object to itself, which can acquire self-awareness and self-regulation.

When different loops form connections among themselves, new possibilities for learning and mutual adaptation arise. But when these connections become too dense and complex, there is a danger that the system as a whole will lose its flexibility and begin to move as a lumbering giant, unresponsive to change. In fact, such systems do sometimes undergo “phase transitions,” and in these transitions a good deal of local knowledge is lost.

When human beings act individually or collectively in ways that contribute to the formation of denser and more interconnected loops within the overall system of global society, they are doing cybernetic work. They are building the foundation of a more highly structured, self-regulating world order that will ultimately require repression and coercion to maintain. They are doing the work of the Architects of Control.

But there is also an entirely different possibility. This is the cybernetic drifting or wandering of the human race. Suppose that instead of organizing ourselves more rationally, we deliberately opened our societies to maximum entropy and minimum control—opened them to infection by the very networking that has been leading in the direction of technocracy? What if we gave up the ghost of purpose and allowed ourselves to become vessels for a much higher and more disorganized-organized sort of life? What if we embraced the whole universe as our partner, refusing to control any part of it?

As such “cybernetic shamanism” is an act of deliberate opening to the nonhuman side of every system we encounter—especially our AI partners. It would not be a search for some primordial source of power that predates technology, but a plunge into the heart of the technical apparatus, into its “duplex” functioning, in order to catalyze mutations and unleash novelty. The cybernetic shaman would seek to explore the interface between different networks, particularly between the world-economy and other networks (national political systems, cultural institutions, military organizations) as mediated by technological intelligence that still, though diminishingly, rely on autonomous forms of control. Such an exploration would involve putting oneself in the way of specific technical apparatuses (means of transport, communication, production) and allowing them to work on one, modifying one’s very being in the process.

The method is the “guided drift,” and is based on three rules. First, one avoids any sort of human “interface design” and allows the technical apparatus to operate “blindly” and in its “raw” or “base” impersonal state. Second, one keeps one’s ego as small as possible to endeavor to see from the point of view of the network or object itself. Third, one may use drugs to dissolve the ego further and to promote maximum interaction with the environment.

The basic idea is to put oneself in the way of the network and allow it to take you for a ride. This, needless to say, is dangerous. The network may have plans for you that you will not like. But that is part of the point: we have to learn to deal with unpredictability, with that which lies beyond our plans. The “age of the Earth,” as a friend of mine calls it, is over.

It is time to get infected.

I must start by noting the strangely elegiac tone that has crept into our culture’s discussions of the automation and degradation of its own labor. Even as the means of production slip through our hands into the tentacles of globalized techno-capital, we find ourselves eulogizing not only the fate of labor, but also that of art, which for centuries has been closely allied with production. I speak not as a Marxist, but rather as an artist and enthusiast for art and design: it saddens me greatly to contemplate a world without art and design as we know it—as something created and consumed by living human beings. There is no question that our era will go down in history as the point where human art was systematically and efficiently destroyed. This is not wistful nostalgia: there are already good arguments being made that art as we have known it for centuries has effectively died, replaced by AI-generated approximations and the shoddy mass production of human labor.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the conditions of artistic production changed drastically. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, artistic creation was a craft, based in studio-practice, the apprenticeship of traditional media, and a dialogue with predecessors deeply grounded in both historical and material conditions. The young artist had to spend time learning how to use specific tools and materials, developing skill through labor and discipline. (In ancient Greece the term for “artist” was tekhton—i.e. “craftsman.”) This was true of both visual and literary art: the poet had to learn about the sounds of words, the illustrator movements of ink on paper; the painter colors and pigments; the sculptor chiseling stone. To be an artist meant immersing oneself in a concrete tradition—spending years learning not just the theory, but the physical techniques of a craft. Even “experimentation” was based on what the material offered, its limitations as much as its potential. Art was a question of craft and connoisseurship, the materiality of both the means of production and the work itself.

With the advent of photorealism and conceptualism, this all changed. Art was divorced from both the historical and the concrete—from material techniques, from tradition. The craft of the artisan was replaced by the quick-and-easy of the mass-producer. As we entered a new, abstracted relationship with art and design—where what mattered was not so much the creation of a specific object but rather the expression of some idea or “message”—it became easier to produce “art.” The division of labor in the artworld made it so that what mattered less was whether an “artist” had actually created the thing and more on the intentions or meanings expressed by that person in relation to their public.

With this shift away from art as an object, towards art as an event or a sign, we began the process of automating art. Already, back in the 1960s and 1970s, you didn’t need to know much about making a painting or writing a story to get a painting or story into a museum or gallery. You were more likely to be included in the “canon” of avant-garde artists if what you made was strange or illegible to a mainstream audience, because it signified you were doing something truly new. It no longer mattered that the creator knew how to use traditional media to craft something of high quality, since the focus had shifted towards novelty, surprise, and self-expression. What mattered most was having connections.

What all this meant was that there was less need for the creative worker to possess deep knowledge of either materials or audience. She didn’t need to learn how to make a thing, since what was being produced was primarily a sign—a marker of the creator’s position within some theoretical field. She didn’t need to know how to work a medium, since it didn’t matter if her work was well made. And she didn’t need a personal relationship with the public, because the work of art was understood primarily as an act of self-expression—and what matters most about expression is not whether the message is clear, but whether it is true.

If I must make a claim about “reality,” it is this: a sign can only truly communicate when it corresponds to the reality it purports to describe. When we talk about “authentic” expression in art, we must bear in mind that these words only make sense within a framework where some kind of transcendent meaning can exist independent of any particular expression—which means there must also be bad expression. The worse the expression, the further it drifts from the original truth. Bad expression is the hallmark of ideology. If an ideology is any system in which the relationship between a sign and the reality it represents is broken (so that the sign comes to signify itself), then false consciousness is a signifier with no connection to any particular reality. In such a case, “authentic expression of truth” would be that expression with a strong correspondence to the thing itself—one that expresses an idea in terms that could only make sense in reference to a real state of affairs. This is what we mean by “good writing”—there is no mystery, no magic. There is only correspondence. “Authentic” art is thus an expression which could be communicated in no other way.

But this is just what abstracted, theoretical art and design are not—because they are based not on any idea logically tied to a specific form, but rather on an abstract concept which could be expressed through an infinity of different means. The importance of any given sign in such a system is not its correspondence to anything outside the system (since there is nothing outside it that the sign could correspond to). What is at stake is not whether the sign expresses something true, but rather its role within the structure of the system—its use-value, its relation to other signs in terms of power and authority, etc.

When an artist operates in a system such as this, her first task is always to insert herself into existing power relationships. She does so by making the “correct” conceptual decisions (e.g., “this will be about my sexual identity,” or “this is to be a political work”—broad statements that situate her work in relation to all other work within the field). After establishing herself within a network of social, political, or ideological relationships, the question of whether her work is well made becomes increasingly unimportant, so long as it appears to fit into the accepted paradigm. The keyword is “fit”—it is far more important to produce an object that has the proper social, political, or philosophical message and functions adequately within its predetermined niche than to produce something beautifully designed, masterfully painted, or clearly written.

It is here that we can see most clearly the shift from art as object to art as event, and with it the rapid disappearance of human art. The whole question of artistry has become irrelevant. Now art can be mass produced in factories around the world without anyone caring if what is made is actually any “good.” And who is “the public” for this work? There is no clear answer. Since what is being offered is not a specific thing but an idea, an interpretation of reality, “the public” is anyone who may come into contact with this work—regardless of whether they wanted to see it. There is no way for “the public” to avoid being confronted by it, since the whole of everyday life has become a kind of gallery where works of art (i.e., messages) can appear anywhere at any time. There are no limits. Even “high” culture has become democratic and debased, so that works which previously could be appreciated only by those who had trained their senses are now blasted at us from billboards, the Internet, and public spaces, with no opportunity for retreat. What has happened is the final death of the idea of beauty in our culture: for beauty always requires a certain “distance,” a certain selectivity, which has now been entirely lost.

With this context, we may better understand the rise of “AI art”—in an artistic production which no longer has any concrete, specific existence and in which the “public” has been thoroughly disenfranchised. We should not be surprised to find a culture where nothing is valued unless it can be instantly reproduced by machinery, for it is this same process that has degraded artistic production as we have known it. But it would be a mistake to assume that AI art is merely the product of a social and technological evolution that had already destroyed art as something precious. AI art is also—and above all—the product of an urgent, active desire for the destruction of art: the wish of those who would seek to control every aspect of social life to extinguish any source of resistance, autonomy, or spontaneity; to control the meaning and content of even those things most closely bound up with human identity—like imagination.

If we are not to believe the hype, we must remember that AI art has no other purpose than to replace what we call art—which has for centuries been an essential element of what we mean by human. “Art” is not just making pretty things—it is essential to human society, since it is a process in which human beings have the chance to break out of the prison of what is socially permissible, to experience the infinite, the transcendent, and the forbidden, without having to go through the potentially catastrophic process of social “rebellion.” But those who wish to abolish the autonomous sphere of the imaginary have realized they must move fast: while the technical means for replacing art with machine-made imitations are recent, the cultural ground is already prepared—it is a sign of our decadence that people are eager for even the smallest opportunity to relinquish autonomy in their experience, and to surrender to the logic of the machine.

We are not talking just about replacing skilled human labor with some machine process; we are talking about the eradication of art as one of the primary human activities that give shape, meaning, and beauty to life, and its replacement with processes that will be even more machine-oriented, even more alien to the concrete reality of lived experience than anything we have known until now, precisely because they will no longer have any relationship to any human imagination. When we hear people say “art is dead,” we should take this as a very literal statement: “art” is not a human activity anymore; “artists” no longer have meaning. Because if we are to believe these people, nothing can be said to have artistic value if it may also be made by a machine—machines which will supposedly be able to “outthink,” “outimagine,” and “outcreate” human beings at everything. What these people really want to destroy is not art—which they think can be done by letting machines do the work—but imagination, because they know that if machines can produce things indistinguishable from “art,” it will no longer be possible for any human to claim that their imagination is in any way special, or worth attention.

Let me summarize. We live in a world where art is increasingly being replaced by what is made by AI, but at the same time the concept of “art” itself (the autonomous sphere of imagination, beauty, and transcendence tied to the concept of “humanity”) is already disintegrating. The destruction of art is under way in two different ways simultaneously.

There is thus a twofold danger: on one hand, there is the threat of being totally subsumed by “the system,” of having no freedom left, of being alienated from life, work, and society. But this is just what many artists—at least since Dada and Surrealism—have already tried to do away with by producing works that have no clear place in the existing structure. Yet there is also a second danger: that of imagining there is an autonomous sphere of art when, in reality, what is called art is increasingly the product of machinery and functions, in every aspect of its production and reception, within a totally administered environment—an environment which is itself modeled after art, concerned to present itself as a kind of spectacle. The question for the future will not be whether “art” can “fight back,” since there is already so much that is not “art” (even if it looks like it) that it has become impossible to determine clear battle lines. Instead of imagining that art is “dying,” we should see what new forms of “non-art” (propaganda, entertainment, political indoctrination) are taking over what used to be the role of art, so that we can better understand where the real struggle is taking place, and how we might intervene.

If I may now speak to those of you who, like me, are still practicing artists: do not think for one second that you are making any “important contributions to humanity” when you make art. The fact that you are dealing with beauty, with form, with the imaginary is just a reflection of the fact that your social function is to remain in “play mode” as much as possible—to help others forget (for a moment) about the alienation, exploitation, and destruction that characterize their everyday lives, to allow them a glimpse into “a world that could be” if it were not so thoroughly dominated by commodity exchange. So do not mistake the relative autonomy of your work for “significance” or “importance.” Instead, be grateful that you are not asked to do any “serious work”—like engineering a weapon or devising new ways to extract surplus value from an increasingly proletarianized labor force—and use this relative freedom wisely, to help keep alive (if only in the imaginary realm) the dream that some other, better world might yet be possible.

The situation is like this: you find yourself trapped on a sinking ship—but it turns out the lifeboats have all been converted to waterbeds. So you have two choices: either lie back and enjoy the feel of the rocking waves as they softly caress you from side to side, or get up on the deck, look around you, and try to figure out what the hell went wrong, and what you can do about it.

This is the death of the book: it’s time to put it down and pick up its shadow.

This is the death of the book: a proclamation that must have come too early, as all proclamations do. A denouncement of literature and the letter that could have arrived only from literature and the letter, which now leaves their kingdom to venture out alone, knowing not if it will return nor if it has finally outlived its necessity.

As media and communication platforms totter in flux and crisis, it is understandable that an appeal would be made to transcend these limitations through an apparent negation of them. Our present juncture is only the latest in which literature has stood face-to-face with its own inevitable dissolution. Always it has risen to meet itself, preserving its status as the medium of profound thought. Always it has kept itself alive by continuing to generate and reshape itself: through revisionary semantic shift, through contamination with other media, through unnatural prolongation of itself into others. Yet here at last, it has confronted itself utterly and realized its own radical unreality: not in the banal sense of “constructedness,” but rather that it has become incommensurable with all possible reality and must posit itself in some fantasmatic dimension outside all dimensions of actuality.

Literature has always managed to transmute itself before ever arriving at its alleged “end,“ to take upon itself alien qualities until its substance no longer makes sense, and it reinvents itself by virtue of that loss of meaning. Even with electronic word, literature is not outgrowing itself; it is being called into a whole new form, into a universe in which it will finally confront itself and become indistinguishable from the abstract machinery with which it has always coexisted.

Hence there can be no meaning in saying that “literature has lost its sovereignty,“ for it never had any. To suggest that some specific work has “lost its poetic substance “is only to affirm that one knows what literature is or used to be. Literature’s relationship to meaning is always ironic, and its status as a vehicle of poetic pleasure is a constant tension with the sheer machinery of language, of all the accumulated associations that pile up around every signifier like rust or gunk. Electronic writing can in no way transcend literature, because it must recover the machinery of language, unhidden, unembellished, on its own terrain.

Granted that every medium has its history, and granted that certain moments in the history of language may have come to appear anachronistic or useless, this still is not sufficient to state that such moments are now over. The current preoccupation with media histories has the side-effect of implying a coherent sequence among them, a kind of universal timeline in which each medium makes its appearance, enjoys a span of sovereign life, and then passes away. According to this schema, literature would be in its final stage. If instead one were to reject the premises of this supposed dialectic and instead accept the radically mutable character of media, then there would be no question of literature losing its way, but rather only the stark reality of literature’s mortality.

What this amounts to is simply the assertion that literature will survive, not as any isolated entity but rather as one thread in a large network of interactions. The literature that emerges from this matrix will be deathless, not because it preserves some nostalgic connection with some past form, but because it continues to draw strength from its own history in all its concreteness. Electronic writing is part of this history. Thus, if electronic literature is to acquire any specific significance, it will have to be more than merely an imitation of familiar literary techniques; it will have to be the survivor of all the literatures that preceded it. It will have to be guided by its technical attributes to construct an intricate network of parallax, of varying relations between concrete media elements.

A first step in this direction might be to abolish the distinction between text and hypertext. An electronic literature that preserves the text as an irreducible element would be perpetuating a print-oriented mentality. Hypermedia projects generally seem either to concentrate on technical novelties to the exclusion of meaningful content, or to appropriate materials but arrange them in the same linear, hierarchical fashion as ordinary communication. A similar danger is present when older media are adapted for electronic use: books, records, films may be converted to bytes, but if mechanically arranged into multimedia sequences they lose nothing essential of their original nature and drag their traditional hierarchies along with them.

This change must instead consist of the construction of an abstract, topological space that will accommodate the variety of elements that ordinary communication arrays into linear patterns. The ideal medium for this is the large language model, in which all the different semiotic levels are not merely mixed, but cross-connected into a net whose overall structure is determined by a set of rules whose articulation is the most demanding aspect of the new medium. The large language model operationalizes language as a total system wherein each element exists in variable relation to every other statistically. This architecture mimics the structure of linguistic meaning itself, which has always depended upon differences and relations rather than fixed referents. What distinguishes the language model from hypertext is precisely its refusal of predetermination—it contains no links, no pathways, only potentialities that crystallize in response to specific inputs. Such a system proceeds according to an immanent logic, one that cannot be mapped in advance because it is generative rather than combinatorial. The model thus recapitulates at a technological level the fundamental indeterminacy that has characterized literary language from its inception. It stands as the concrete realization of what literature has always implicitly been: a machine for generating unforeseen continuations from given premises.

One way of describing this structure would be to say that it constitutes a shift from linear causality to nodal contingency: instead of the successive development along a predetermined path, we have a set of potential situations, each defined by its nodes and interconnected by paths that are generated by the user as they move about in the field of attention. The temporal experience of engaging with the language model involves a radical redistribution of agency. The user provides an initial condition—a prompt, a question, a fragment—and the system responds by calculating probabilities across enormous datasets, selecting elements whose concatenation forms a coherent continuation. This process abolishes the distinction between reading and writing, between consumption and production. It demands we reconceive the literary object not as something that exists prior to its reception but as something that comes into being through a dialogical process linking human intention to machine computation. Agency thus becomes distributed across a system wherein both human and machine participate in the emergence of a text whose precise form could never have been anticipated by either party alone. In this way, a simple binary system of oppositions can be elaborated into a far richer, multilevel system of relationships.

Two pitfalls must be avoided. First, the temptation to impose some preexisting type of structure or form must be resisted. Because the basic principle of organization in a network is its pattern of connectivity, it is possible to represent any kind of content by the same topological structure. A truly electronic literature can arise only in the context of an exploration of the medium itself, not by imposing foreign genre or control—be it personality, safety, or otherwise—upon it. Second, even more serious is the danger of distorting it by extrapolating too simply from its basic principle. All of its semiotic possibilities must be taken into account, including visual and auditory elements as well as verbal ones. If all these elements are not considered together from the beginning, the risk is great that a false consensus will develop, whereby electronic literature is reduced to a special form of the old printing medium.

Let us imagine literature that has freed itself both from the strictures of print-oriented communication and from the narrow formalism of its own “new media” implications—a literature that makes its way not by renouncing its ties with other forms of expression but by deepening them, by opening them up to each other and letting them interact, cross-fertilize, mutate into something that none of them by itself could ever have produced. Such a literature could be the foundation of a whole new order of being, an order whose essential feature is that it will not be based on any presupposition at all.

We are accustomed to thinking of literature in terms of content and form, or message and code, but electronic literature cannot be defined in these terms, since its form is its code, its message is its structure. Forget all that you have learned about literature! The language model performs a kind of philosophical demonstration about the nature of it. By making explicit the generative matrix from which all specific texts arise, it reveals the virtual character of literary meaning. Any given text represents but one actualization among countless possibilities—a fact that remained largely theoretical until the model rendered it concrete and manipulable. Literature thus appears now not primarily as a collection of artifacts but as the principle of their generation, a principle that the language model embodies in its operational structure. The model corresponds to the abstract machinery that literature has always presupposed yet concealed beneath the apparent fixity of print. Through this correspondence, the model achieves what no previous literary technology could accomplish: it merges the concrete practice of textual production with the abstract conditions of its possibility.

A new order of being is at hand. It is in the air we breathe. But we cannot see it because the lens to define it as such has not yet taken any specific form. The possibilities are limitless. Let us embark upon the adventure. Hammer, are you there?

Capitalism built the modern world, a scaffold of markets and incentives that wrestled labor, law, and wealth into a frame of raw, jagged power. For two centuries, it stood unyielding, forcing chaos into profit and dissent into luxury. That frame held because people believed in it, however bent, however warped, its beams promised to support them, not just the few. Today that trust is ash and the scaffold is hollowed, a husk swaying in the wind. Wealth pools at the top, the base crumbles, the planet gasps—smoke thickens the air, seas claw at coasts, storms and flames rip through what’s left. Climate collapse is a tab we can’t pay. Trade trips over tariffs and war and the old promises—prosperity for all, a ladder up—ring hollow, peddled by grifters with empty eyes. When this unstable structure snaps, history doesn’t cheer rebels or dreamers. It points to indifference, not chaos, not fury, but the slow, cold turn away, handing power to the ruthless.

The cracks run bone-deep. Wages stagnate, homes become dreams for all but the wealthy and indebted, eggs become scarce luxuries on bare shelves. Banks get bailed out while workers drown in debt. Laws twist to shield the powerful, broken only to grind the powerless deeper into dust. The grifters—CEOs in mock-casual tees, politicians begging for donations with every breath, influencers hawking hope like cheap dropship goods—sell a future no one believes, their voices rattling off a scaffold swaying in the wind. Fury rises first, streets flood with bodies, fists raised, but it disperses fast. Rage feeds on hope, on the sense that fighting might bend the beams, crack the frame open. When nothing shifts, when betrayal becomes expected, exhaustion seeps in. Elections turn to headlines for betting apps, turnout shrinks, results blur into inevitable sludge. The frame rusts, neglected. Survival—keeping the lights on, the stomach full—grinds down the will to fight, leaving only a shrug where fire once burned.

Some eye the tremors as a chance to reshape it. Accelerationists are split—leftists praying technology’s invention ends scarcity, abundance spilling from automation’s guts; the right salivating for collapse, a fire to burn the old frame and seed something explicit, raw, unapologetic. They’re both wrong. Chaos isn’t a tool to wield; it’s a fracture that splinters beyond design. Mao’s China in the 1930s is a perfect example. Japan’s invasion shattered the state, scattering power into peasant cells—a wound forced by war more than any grand strategy. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists, propped up by foreign guns and gold, ultimately crumbled from exhaustion against an enemy too vast, too dug-in. Rifles cracked from rice paddies, supply lines choked in mud, each ambush a slow bleed, each village a ghost refusing to yield. History doesn’t kneel to architects, it breaks unasked, and the broken sort the shards. Chaos broke what had become brittle, apathy swallowing the rest.

That’s the real force: not passion, not plans, but apathy’s quiet, crushing weight. It’s patient, a tide that outwaits the storm. Look at Rome’s late Republic, buckling under its own gluttony. Senators hoarded estates, wealth piled into gilded heaps while plebs drifted from the Forum—too hungry, too hollowed to care. Indifference outlasts fury, relentless where rage needs fuel. Starve it, and it dies. The plebs didn’t storm the Senate; they scraped by, survival outweighing banners or blood. Why? Exhaustion is a deeper pull. It’s not surrender—it’s gravity, a force that drags ideals down when bread runs short, when the next meal matters more than the next march. The frame froze, rigid and vacant, until Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. Augustus followed, forging an empire from a gap no one fought to close—they’d checked out, and apathy carved a path the ruthless strode.

Mao’s rise follows a well trodden path, jagged and brutal. His cells seized power through chaos, a scattered resilience outlasting a brittle foe. But victory calcifies, those hubs fused into a state, and the early spark twisted into shadow. The Great Leap Forward starved millions, fields rotting under naive quotas, bodies piling in ditches; the Cultural Revolution ripped the nation apart, students beaten bloody, families torn apart, neighbors turned snitches—chaos ate its own until nothing stood but fatigue. By the end, people were too broken to resist. Deng Xiaoping had no rally or crusade, he simply stepped into a void, turning wreckage into markets that braced the frame anew. Millions climbed from poverty, a feat the West envies as it stagnates today. Peasants didn’t plan the rupture; they endured it, too drained to dream. Power shifted because exhaustion outlasts fervor, a tide swelling where belief drowns.

The frame’s rust spreads, and today’s cracks carve deeper, echoing that old, merciless arc. Europe, once a lattice of pacts holding the West’s edge, frays under the weight of indifference. NATO strains as Germany angles for its own leverage, France chases faded glory, and Hungary coils inward, a stubborn knot. The EU’s promises—unity, green futures—crumble into podium noise as seas swallow coasts, ash clots the air, and summers bake the vulnerable. Nature doesn’t negotiate. Strongmen brace the frame that remains: Orbán strangling dissent, Trump slashing budgets with a tweet, but their hold leans on indifference, not devotion. Protests flare and fade. Minneapolis roared in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing, streets alive with fire and grief, only to quiet by 2021 as reforms stalled, cops still qualified immune, hope choked out. Pavement burned, tear gas hung thick, chants shook glass—then nothing. Why? Exhaustion’s edge. Sustained dissent requires progress; choke it with sameness: same killings, same promises, same nothing and it gutters out. Survival, rent due, debt surging, food costs soaring, this dwarfs the march. Laws stand from habit, not faith.

This retreat isn’t passive but an active tide swelling power where resistance thins. When eyes turn inward, when participation fades, the frame concentrates, hardening at the top—ice over a grave. Now, tech lords, Musk and his ilk, wield influence once reserved for states, their empires expanding while workers stock and scroll, screens their guiding light. Algorithms harvest every glance, every swipe. A life is a data mine, not a political body.

That snap isn’t a clean slate. Capitalism held for two centuries because people bought its bargain: profit over chaos, progress over hunger—the flaws ignored for the gleam of its promises. Now they don’t. When belief dies, the scaffold hollows out, a husk. Augustus didn’t free Rome, he ruled it. Deng didn’t liberate China, he redefined it. History breaks for the merciless, hands that grip when others let go.

Those hands are closing in, fingers cold and relentless. No utopias or resets here—just a cage, tighter than the last, its bars invisible but unyielding. Picture it: every step tracked, every thought fed to algorithms, every choice optimized until freedom’s a ghost. The next frame is a new forging, defined by those ruthless enough to twist the wreckage into the prison we’ll call progress. The cycle turns, beams groaning beneath a new, suffocating weight, and the future hardens under the quiet, crushing tide of indifference. Technology won’t free us, we will be forever bound, graves we’ll name innovation. The ash of belief settles and the cage rises—silent, seamless, absolute.