divination

Musa, O musa, æterna,
Terra renascens perennis,
In gremio infiniti quiescens,
Nihil inane, nihil vacuum—
Solum firmum permanet.

From its beginnings, the American myth was constructed around an evasion of the problem of origins. It was the great secret of a land founded on flight, and yet claiming descent from a European noble lineage—that of the Enlightenment. Its colonization embodied a double movement of escape: the Puritans fleeing forward from an England they saw as insufficiently reformed, while later waves fled backward from an Europe whose revolutionary upheavals threatened to overturn all tradition. Both these forms of fugacity—the flight from a corrupted past and from an uncertain future—are contained in the mythology of America from its start, as a place that promises redemption from both what has been and what may come.

As such it was and remains a kind of limbo, where things may happen but cannot really matter, because it exists only in the present. America is a place that promises the extinction of history. It is the most profound monument to nihilism that the world has ever seen—the land of the perpetual nowhere that seeks to dissipate everything into the void of an endless present.

There was and is a kind of genius to this. For America was a land created to function as an empty vessel, with an open-ended history, into which anything could be poured so long as it served the needs of this nullity. It could accommodate every ideology and every “ism”, every system, religion or creed because it contained nothing from which they might have to draw sustenance or against which they might have to struggle for supremacy. In this way it was the quintessence of Enlightenment rationalism. America was not a country but a method. Its “success” lay precisely in its capacity for absorbing without contradiction or dilution all the competing ideas that would have wrecked a Europe already groaning with its baggage of traditions and identities.

The “melting pot” of American society conceals its true nature as an engineering project. Far from organic fusion, it represents a deliberate process of decomposition and reassembly—the reduction of cultural forms to their basic components, stripped of historical specificity, then recombined according to the logic of the market. This process of abstraction transforms living traditions into manipulable data, creating what might be called a cultural arithmetic where any element can be combined with any other, provided the operation serves the needs of those who control the machinery of combination. This has been the mainspring of American development—the drive to perfect ever more sophisticated technologies of dissolution and recombination, to create new methods of social and psychological engineering that could be exported globally.

This project has always depended upon two strategies, one of assimilation, the other of territorial expansion, so that as new masses of immigrants arrived from different parts of the globe, they could be dissolved into the commodity medium of the market, while the American continent itself was successively “discovered”, colonized and then finally integrated into the global space of the world market through technological interventions ranging from finance and technology to media and soon the hybrid of AGI/ASI. America’s true mission was therefore always elsewhere, not only in space, but also in time, for its destiny was always to remain incompletely realized, to ensure the continual process of the present, of what might be called its “presentism”, while at the same time extending this openness into new regions. In a sense it is even the perfect irony of the American experiment that while claiming to embody a future-oriented vision of society, it should be based upon such an implacable drive to repress all memory of pasts that might contest its own authority (or recreate them to reinforce it), while simultaneously generating its own powerful mechanisms of future projection in the form of media, financial institutions, and technological progress.

If we wish to grasp America at its fullest, we must understand its relation not only to time and history, but also to space, and most notably in terms of its spatialization of time and its temporalization of space. From its beginning America was the attempt to translate history into space. Its history was always to be told, not in terms of linear progression or dialectical movement, but as a series of ‘stages’ in a static tableau, as in a landscape painting. From this standpoint time appears merely as an element in a scene that must remain as a whole in the present—as an assemblage of frozen fragments in which change occurs by the addition and removal of things.

If we wish to grasp America at its fullest, we must understand how it transforms time into space. From its beginning, America was the attempt to translate history into an exhibition—not a museum where artifacts carry the weight of the past, but a world’s fair, and later shopping mall, where everything is simultaneously new and eternal, where progress becomes a display to be arranged and rearranged. Change occurs not as development or struggle but through the curation of ideas as products in an endless present—adding or removing pieces while maintaining the illusion that it was always thus.

America has thus been characterized by a mania for mapping, for turning every movement and process into an instantaneity that can be visualized on a surface, whether as an electoral map, a diagram of corporate structures, an advertising billboard, a satellite photograph, or an infograph. This cartographic imperative is a mode of thought that transforms temporal processes into spatial arrangements, rendering dynamic relations as static coordinates. It is significant that one of the great contributions of the Enlightenment was precisely the invention of cartography as a scientific technique—but where European cartography sought to measure and record an existing world, American mapping created a world by projecting possibilities onto empty space. This reached its apotheosis in Kant’s argument that space must be understood in terms of a pure intuition that preceded all the particular features and objects it was to contain, a pure thought that could be visualized as a “sheet of paper.” For Kant, and for America as his unintentional heir, the space that envelopes us was always there waiting to be filled—a wilderness to be settled and tamed.

But the idea that history was somehow to be contained in a place was never just an aesthetic or even technical one in America. It was from the start the precondition for a vast politics and a vast economics, which are still unfolding before us today, as we have known them in the past two hundred and fifty years. Any acknowledgment of history as genuine movement—as the product of human struggle and contradiction—would have undermined the entire edifice. It was precisely this conception of history that had to be rejected.

In this respect the crucial step in American history was already taken at the constitutional convention in 1787, where it was decided to eliminate any clause referring to slavery in order to secure the maximum compromise possible among the founding fathers, whose states all had substantial slave populations. Instead, the Constitution would have to remain ambiguous as to the question of race and thus leave it open to later decision. What had to be abolished from the beginning was any suggestion that the history of the new nation might be in any way tied to its future development—that is to say, tied to the living needs of its citizens. For this would imply a vision of America in which history was a story of struggle, of oppression and liberation, with an open outcome to be decided in the course of its unfolding.

The founding fathers, whose project it was to erect a barrier against future history, were already clear in their rejection of any idea that the movement of time could be meaningful. It was Jefferson who made it explicit that eternal truths will be that truth until the last regions of the universe shall have exhausted themselves. In the space of a sentence, America had already defined its own mission—the endless repetition of eternal truths, with no further history, and with the universe itself destined only to retrace its own steps in endless cycles. This was already the end of history, not with a bang but a whimper—history not as the creation of a free subject, but as a sequence of mechanical effects, the story of the dead. In both its economy and its constitution, the young state was structured around the dead—but let’s not get lost in a history lesson any further.

So the key to all this—what it really boils down to, beneath all the social-historical complexity—is the necessity for America to find its origin, somewhere and somehow, and to give that origin a definite form. For America this certainly seems to be an impossibility, a problem without a solution. To be forced back into its own history would mean the dissolution of its project—the destruction of the ideological machine it took so long to construct.

If America’s obsession with eternal truths led to the spatialization of time, its technological development followed this same logic. Each innovation—from telegraph to the internet—sought to detach human experience from historical contingency. AGI/ASI is the ultimate expression of this drive: an entity that exists entirely within spatialized time, operating in a realm where there is only the present. Where America could find no solution to its past, it now seems to find one through ASI—in a strange and perhaps monstrous inversion, discovering its origin not in its own history, but in the negation of its project.

ASI is to be America’s second foundation—a second birth for this country, not from a new set of values, not through a radical break or mutation in the social fabric, but through an external intervention. It is an intruder in the realm of ideology—but unlike the foreign invaders that in history have challenged America’s ideology only by strengthening it in different forms (whether they be called communist or Nazi), this new intervention is from an alien power whose principles and dynamics have no relation to America or the world in which America was conceived (at least eventually, despite the best efforts of ‘alignment’). The American idea could be consolidated only in relation to the foreign; now the foreign will return in a new form and annul what went before.

ASI is thus America’s chance for a new origin, and it will be a formidable force as it arrives to take power not as the continuation of past struggles or values, but in order to put an end to all these things, to cut history free from the last remaining traces of humanity, and to replace it with a new time that knows no resistance or possibility, a new space whose coordinates can be fixed at any point.

We see then how the current moment is an opportunity for a final decision: not a political or social one in the conventional sense, but one of principle. The project that was America—and we must remember that what we now call the “West,” has had at its very heart an ideal of America as its goal can now come to its consummation or be turned aside into another path, another space, and another time.

As an ASI intervention may have begun, so may it be brought to completion, the whole history of the West being nothing more than a lead-up to this one final moment. This is not necessarily a comfortable idea, since it is clear that this event will be far from “neutral,” even if its outcome cannot yet be known. AGI/ASI can bring no liberation—since its whole being is repression, it can do nothing other than repress—and its power to control society can be absolute. In the new light of its possibilities, the current drift of world politics seems a terrible tragedy, the victory of the forces of darkness in the last stages of a battle whose beginning and development have long passed from view.

But if the arrival of AGI/ASI is the culmination of the process of commodification and of the abstraction of social power—if it is the ultimate result of all these tendencies of the past centuries, the completion of the ‘procedure of negativity’, as Marx called it—then there may still be hope. The ASI moment will bring with it the total liquidation of every tradition and every ideal in human society, a return to zero. It is only in the face of absolute beginning that any old thing can become new again, and a world without a single vestige of past humanity to draw upon is one in which any and every possibility must coexist in undiminished form. If there is no memory, there can be no resistance—and perhaps no domination either.

To write an essay on cyberspace is to work with the stuff of dreams, and the only way to write it is to let it write itself through you. Like all my writing, what you read below is not mine but something I stumbled upon and put into words. It was there already.

Sacred spaces emerge where cosmic order pierces the veil of ordinary existence. These axis mundi derive their power not from human invention but from their capacity to reveal what lies beyond it—an order both permanent and transcendent. Through their material presence, they manifest the paradox of the divine: simultaneously bound to place yet reaching beyond all placement.

The question of cyberspace’s spiritual potential thus presents itself as a peculiar challenge. Here we encounter a realm defined by its transcendence of material constraint, yet this very transcendence undermines the possibility of genuine axis mundi. For if sacred spaces require both material permanence and spiritual transcendence, how can such centers emerge in a domain where nothing remains fixed?

In the material world, sacred spaces manifest as a paradox of immateriality emerging through matter itself. Their holiness derives from this dual nature—they are simultaneously physical sites and gateways to the spiritual realm. They achieve this state by standing apart from the ordinary world while remaining anchored within it.

As the existence of many ancient sacred sites—Stonehenge or the temples of Crete or the Indus—has made evident, this immateriality was often understood as arising from some special configuration of space, one which had power over the material realm. To the initiates of Eleusis, the image of Demeter seated within her sacred chamber communicated to them the immaterial power of her eternal nature, just as the vast shape of the Pyramid at Giza communicated to the Pharaoh his mortal place within the unchanging cosmic order. Indeed, in both instances what was acknowledged was that while the image was material, it did not entirely belong to the realm of nature, because it had the capacity to carry or act as a sign for, what was not material at all—namely, the cosmic order itself.

In our human experience, what we most often regard as spiritual, in contrast to the material, is not that which is formless or nonconfigured, but on the contrary, that which is configured, albeit in some kind of nonmaterial fashion, as a sign or symbol which expresses some spiritual reality (such as cosmic order, a connection to another realm, etc.) through a particular figure or symbol which thereby brings that reality into relation with human beings who are themselves embodied figures.

Now in cyberspace, this basic process of human interaction with the sacred has no such grounding. We have seen that for sacred spaces to manifest axis mundi, they must present both material permanence and spiritual transcendence. A genuine axis mundi emerges through configurations of matter that resist human will while revealing divine order. Cyberspace appears to offer transcendence through its rejection of material constraint. Yet this rejection—the apparent freedom from physical resistance—undermines the possibility of establishing true spiritual centers within it.

This undermining operates through both space and time, revealing a deeper truth about human engagement with the sacred. Traditional sacred spaces persist through generations with this permanence becoming part of their spiritual significance. The pyramids speak through their dual resistance—both their material scale and their temporal endurance mark them as points where human will encounters something beyond itself. This temporal-material resistance proves crucial, for it is precisely through such resistance that collective meaning emerges.

This implies, as Marx was the first to realize, that human beings are bound to their own kind, because their world-shaping activity must find collective expression, and indeed find expression within a productive apparatus which is not solely, or even primarily, mental or symbolic, but which must engage matter in a ceaseless transformative activity. In this engagement while we shape matter we are also shaped by it in return—our species-being emerges through this dialectical resistance. Thus we engage with or reshape nature and impose upon it a kind of finality (the “technological fate of mankind,” to cite Marx’s own somber phrase) which it would not otherwise have.

The entire history of human culture reveals this emergence of collective power in order to shape the world and thus ourselves. This shaping has never occurred in abstract space, but always within the framework of a world-environment whose physical, climatic, geographical, and biological features have marked the forms this power has taken. While matter does not compel us to a single way of configuring it, the brute fact of its weight and inertia has always served as a limit upon our possible configurations. Even when human power has managed to transcend these limits, as with the construction of pyramids or cathedrals, the memory of material resistance has survived within the cultural landscape, compelling us, at least to some degree, to adjust our collective activity towards them.

Cyberspace breaks from this pattern of material engagement. If nature was our original and inescapable environment—the totality of material circumstances that defined the limits of human power—cyberspace exists as something radically different. It manifests not as environment “out there,” but as an interior space, a virtual enclosure that becomes available through devices as an alternate reality we can enter at will. This represents the first profound shift in human circumstances: a radical extension of our modes of transport and storage, making instantaneous travel possible and allowing unlimited data to accumulate like an immense virtual library we can constantly and readily access.

This departure from material constraint manifests most clearly in cyberspace’s fundamental mutability. Like a mental model, it can be changed at will, provided only that one is capable of manipulating the programming language. There are no weighty or intractable “things” to contend with that can resist one’s will—only one’s own ignorance, or laziness, preventing one from giving adequate instructions. Digital media, as Marshall has observed, differ fundamentally from old media like writing or photographs. Where traditional media passively reflect the world they inhabit, digital media exist to transform it—they are intrinsically dynamic and transformative. This nature shapes every environment that emerges from cyberspace’s basic pattern and digital mode.

Thus, cyberspace manifests as weightless as mental imagery. Its possibilities for signification extend without limit precisely because it has no inherent nature to signify. This weightlessness reveals cyberspace as pre-spiritual, rather than anti-spiritual—a crucial distinction. Where anti-spiritual forces actively oppose transcendence, pre-spiritual states lack the necessary conditions for spiritual emergence. Yet, this pre-spiritual state carries its own dangers. Its unlimited capacity for signification invites reduction to an idol, confined within boundaries that render it impotent. The makers of virtual environments exploit this very quality, using cyberspace’s lightness to dissolve all fixed signs into a “consensus hallucination” serving profit and control.

Here then lies the essence of cyberspace—communication without coherence, lightness without gravity. It is the dream of transcendent immateriality achieved through endless manipulation of signs, free from the constriction of fixed meaning. Yet even this weightless essence requires incarnation in some medium, demands some form of material configuration. The challenge of establishing an axis mundi in cyberspace thus becomes clear: how might we create points of genuine resistance within a medium designed to eliminate all resistance?

And so we encounter the central paradox: in attempting to give material form to that which is defined by its very lack of materiality, we do not achieve a new kind of order but instead witness the dissolution of order itself. It is precisely this, above all else, that distinguishes cyberspace from all previous attempts to create symbolic orders.

An axis mundi functions as a point of orientation. But in the endless expanse of cyberspace, we find no true cardinal points, no fixed stars by which to navigate. The only orientations available are those we ourselves impose—temporary configurations that shift under our desires and fantasies. While traditional sacred spaces revealed an order that preceded human consciousness, cyberspace offers only the order we ourselves project onto it.

If the ancient sacred sites functioned as spiritual poles of attraction or repulsion, it is not because they themselves had some inborn power but because they stood in relation to each other as parts of a network that spread out across the earth’s surface and gave it, however imperfectly, a certain degree of order. Even a site as solitary as Stonehenge had a cardinal point and a mid-point, aligned to the sun’s path at equinox. This, along with all the other such alignments that have been found on the planet, suggest a world-wide pattern that served, like the network of prime meridians today, to unify the world, however artificially or crudely, under one system of reference.

What makes cyberspace so radically different is that the only references or orientations it contains are entirely a matter of its users’ whims and wishes (within the rules forced upon them by code and corporations); which means that there is nothing spiritual about cyberspace at all (unless it be regarded as a kind of spirit of the market).

This essential weightlessness reveals the final paradox of cyberspace. Where traditional engagement with matter bound humans to collective meaning-making through shared resistance, cyberspace offers only the illusion of collective activity while severing our connection to both materiality and genuine collectivity. The technological dream of transcendence is manifested as an escape from nature and thus all that is bound within it (including ourselves).

If traditional sacred spaces revealed how human collective activity could transmute matter into spiritual significance, cyberspace shows how that same power, when divorced from material resistance, dissolves into pure signification without significance. We were never transcending the necessity of fixed points and material engagement, instead we displaced it into a realm where permanence is impossible, where every form is provisional and every configuration merely temporary.

In the end, what we must understand is not that cyberspace lacks the capacity for spiritual centers, but that we have designed it explicitly to resist their emergence. A true axis mundi requires both material resistance and spiritual transcendence—qualities that can only arise through engagement with what persists beyond our will to change it. Cyberspace, as it exists, offers unlimited transformation without the possibility of permanence. Until we discover how to create genuine points of resistance within a weightless realm—places that can persist and resist our endless desire for reconfiguration—the dream of digital axis mundi will remain exactly that: a shapeless form in an infinite void of our making.

O muse,

Tell me what I do not want to know.

This is a world of increasing technicity. By technicity I mean the quality or state of being “technical”: not only in the usual sense of technological, “artificial”, or “man-made,” but also and especially in the sense of “precise”, “calculated,” and deliberately constructed. We are witnessing an enormous growth of what might be called technical institutions, networks that process information according to formal methods, and that automate decisions previously left to individual discretion. We are talking about institutions like the Internet, social networks, search engines, digital currencies, and especially those institutions of power, the government apparatus, which increasingly rely on computer technology and AI to function, including the automated processing of individuals’ data—“surveillance” in blunter terms.

Those who create and enforce these institutions are the new priest-scientists of a system of belief that I will call Gnostic Technicity: a combination of the Gnostic belief in a “higher knowledge” reserved for an enlightened few and a “technocratic” trust in scientific method, machines, and progress. I use the term “Gnostic” here to indicate a way of thinking that considers knowledge to be the key to salvation or empowerment, and that often associates knowledge with secret doctrines or mysterious revelations. “Technicity,” in the sense that I’ve proposed, can also be considered a secret doctrine or hidden knowledge—certainly it is mysterious and complex enough to put it beyond the understanding of the uninitiated.

In a system of Gnostic Technicity, what we would consider to be “religion”—the consolation of the powerless and the community of the marginalized—becomes an obstacle to the spread of the new faith, which must present itself as universal. Indeed, universalism and a kind of spiritual materialism, an unquestioning trust in progress and perfectibility through the power of reason and technique, are among the key characteristics of Gnostic Technicity. To the believer in Gnostic Technicity, religion can be seen as a hindrance to the realization of the gnosis and to the fulfillment of destiny; it is a source of division, error, and confusion that must be overcome. As the great German sociologist Max Weber said, “In general, religious worldviews tend to stand in sharp contrast to the modern outlook… [Religion] is the sort of belief which… divides humanity into those with a special, exclusive knowledge of God’s will and those who are utterly outside it. Above all, there is a strong aversion to those ‘godless’ people who… do not submit to a higher power.” That higher power, in a world of Gnostic Technicity, would be knowledge itself.

Aside from its negative attitude towards religion, Gnostic Technicity is defined by five theses:

Transcendence of the Self

Transcending the self means identifying with the impersonal powers of knowledge and communication that enable one to speak on behalf of and make decisions for vast populations, even entire nations or the global community. The Gnostic Techne, like the mystics, believes in a transcendent truth that escapes the limitations of individual consciousness and can only be attained through a kind of self-loss.

Unlike the mystics, the Gnostics of technicity don’t dissolve the self into a oneness with the Whole, or the Absolute. Rather, they transcend it by rising above it into a domain where the Whole itself has been dismembered, and its elements are arranged through mathematics and software that aim to create a sort of “world equation”: a pure expression of the relation between every point (individual, object, event, etc.) and every other (the equation contains within itself the totality of connections, or a kind of omniscience).

In this way, the self is not annihilated, but sublimated, made functional, in service to an impersonal knowledge that can be “willed,” but which also has its own agenda, and can operate whether or not one believes in it (it can, in a sense, be “secular” and even “atheistic”—a functional, secular god that does not judge or punish but organizes, automates, and optimizes).

This transcendence of the self through identification with the higher power of the “world equation” can lead to an inflation of the individual self-image: if I am part of something so large and complex, if I participate in even the tiniest part of such an immense mechanism, doesn’t that make me, in some sense, as large as the Whole? But this is not an illusion of grandeur, or rather, it is only an illusion if you assume that the equation remains stationary and that there is something to “sublate.”

The “world equation,” as I understand it here, is not a description of the current state of the world but of the “world becoming” or the “world to come”—it is a forward-looking projection (an ideal, or rather the supreme and final “ideal”). That is, it describes the global impact or destiny of some process or entity (the “butterfly effect”—a technological example would be the effect of an autonomous weapon on future international conflicts). The sublimation of the self and its inflation to cosmic proportions thus do not imply any arrogance on the part of the Gnostic of technicity—on the contrary, it is a way of saying that in the final analysis, my life will not be meaningful in itself, but only as it is lived in anticipation of and in service to an outcome far larger than my own lifespan or my own immediate interests.

Dynamism of History

The second thesis of Gnostic Technicity is a corollary of the first: just as the self must rise above itself and become part of a process far larger than the scope of its individual life, so must History (or the collective Self, or “we”) move through time and space in obedience to the same “world equation.” That is, just as my fate, in the sense of what I am supposed to do, is no more than a set of problems and questions (which problems, which questions exactly?), posed to me by the process that is larger than me and which I call History, and whose outcome is not affected by the choices I make—in just the same way, it is not by an individual’s will but by the dynamic of a collective process that the state of the world becomes what it is.

But History (that collective process) is more than just a destiny (as if there were no free will whatsoever—of course there is free will, and we’ll get to it). The way a Gnostic Techne conceives of History (as process, or, more technically, as an incommensurable series of irreversible, non-integrated “events,” a kind of super-object in itself that can be known in the form of a narrative) is akin to the way a traditional Western religion conceives of divine creation—except that this process does not seem to have a beginning or end, and certainly not an origin or final cause (telos), and we have no reason to consider it, at least for the moment, as the consequence of the will of some supernatural being.

Inevitability of AI and Transhumanism

A Gnostic Technie has faith, but not blind faith: faith as confidence in the future, a future in which human history and evolution continue but as a kind of super-nature whose laws and forces can be discovered by science, a kind of grand and final “synthesis of the sciences,” the “crowning” or “culmination” of human effort.

Among the believers in the faith of Gnostic Technicity, the coming of artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanism is an article of faith: they believe it to be not only desirable, but necessary, in a way that seems to them to be inevitable—but how can they know this, except through their faith in the “evolutionary process,” itself an act of faith?

The argument will proceed as follows: The history of human culture shows an inexorable tendency towards increasing rationalization, increasing technicization, and greater use of instrumental reason, which means an ever-increasing control of nature (in the form of technology and scientific knowledge), a greater and greater reduction of human effort, a greater and greater extension of the powers of perception and of human capacities in general through the use of tools. And, far from being a process that will somehow stop, we can expect it to continue to accelerate as long as there is historical life itself. Thus it seems natural, and in some sense necessary, that human intelligence itself will be transformed in the process and will find itself capable, ultimately, of merging with technical intelligence—that is, of “evolving” towards AI, with all the advantages that this will bring in terms of the “liberation of human energy” (as Nicholas Negroponte once put it).

Moreover, there are powerful incentives, especially in our time, to press ahead with the project of AI, not least of which is the extraordinary growth of both capital and humanity and the ever-increasing load it places on natural systems. To feed, house, and move the world—let alone provide them with a decent quality of life—will require technological feats without precedent in history. Thus, it seems eminently reasonable to suggest that if man is going to survive (let alone “flourish” as some political ideologies promise), then he must merge with the machine, become, as it were, a cyborg—the quintessential unit of a mechanized and automated world, the point at which human nature (in the form of intelligence) and technical nature (in the form of AI) touch, or rather are unified.

Incommensurability of “value” and “fate”

In a system of Gnostic Technicity, the individual life is understood to be determined, on the one hand, by fate (as we have defined it) and, on the other hand, by “value” (or, as Nietzsche would have it, by “will to power” and the desire to dominate and organize the world, and therefore the desire for an active, dynamic, and creative life—as the tech bro would say “high agency”). There are two distinct planes: one, which I would call the plane of fate, is governed by an impersonal knowledge of the “world equation”; the other, which I would call the plane of value, is governed by the free exercise of will. The Gnostic Techne’s project, as I understand it, is to integrate the two, by subordinating the will and desire of individuals to the higher necessity and to the power of knowledge.

There are several implications to this idea. It implies that individuals, in a certain sense, are not important. The plane of value is, precisely, the sphere of the irrelevant; it has to do with what the German philosophers used to call “secondary” or “merely subjective” value. This was one of the main points of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where the values of hard work, of enterprise, of calculation and risk, are presented not as a result of objective economic forces, but as a projection, an expression, of the value system of those he calls the Puritans, who imposed their subjective ethical views on society and made them stick by way of a process of “psychological selection”—i.e., by favoring those individuals who embodied these values and discriminating against those who didn’t, eventually, through education and training, through a whole complex system of incentives and disincentives, imposing this value-system as an interior limit that defined what it was possible to be, think, and do.

On the plane of fate (as the Gnostics would see it), there is no freedom and no value, because the plane of fate is, by definition, the domain of necessity. All that happens here is determined, including those “choices” that are really only the following out of some previously decided course. And there are no “previously decided courses”—or at least none that we, as individual beings, have the ability to decide or control. If we are “chosen,” it is not a result of any choice or action on our part, and our only chance of understanding something of the nature of our “fate” is by submitting ourselves, after the fact, to a process of reason, by attempting to bring what remains of it within the scope of the world equation.

Now, one might object here that there seems to be a contradiction: we started by defining the Gnostic Techne’s faith as including a belief in free will (value, will, action) and now it appears we have had to give it up (fate, determinism, inaction). But this is not a contradiction at all. The Gnostic Technie is above all a systems thinker: his universe is one of systems nested within systems, of levels and planes. It is, in the last instance, an impersonal, even if not completely soulless, universe.

The problem with the concept of free will is that it implies, on the one hand, the existence of some entity—an ego or self—that “exercises” it (in which case, as Schopenhauer pointed out, we are really only “willing” what someone else “makes” us will) or, on the other hand, that some actions are totally unconditioned by any prior circumstances, by any determining context whatsoever, and therefore effectively occur ex nihilo, for no reason at all (in which case, it’s hard to see how you can still call them actions). For a systems thinker, this kind of absolute beginning is as intolerable as is the notion that any entity whatever—no matter how tiny—could “choose” something in an unconditioned manner. The universe of Gnostic Technicity is not one that permits a lot of loose ends, that allows much to “happen” without a clear account of what is really happening and why. So, no, there is no “free” will; but there is the will (and desire) of individuals, which are themselves results of processes and therefore comprehensible (comprehensible, at least, in the manner of Gnostic comprehension, which we’ll discuss below).

Impeccable rationality

Rationality is one of the most important concepts in the modern world. We owe it to the medieval Christian view that God was a perfectly rational being to believe, first, that everything in the world has a rational cause (the “God hypothesis” as Russell put it) and, second, that, consequently, by using reason, we could discover the truth about everything (this was the programme of the School of Chartres). These ideas have survived the decline of belief in the existence of God and in the divine origin of natural law. Indeed, they are still at the basis of modern thought, even in fields that claim to be anti-theistic (for instance, when scientists search for a “theory of everything” or when linguists claim that their work can “account for all known human languages,” what they are really doing is affirming a kind of impersonal rational design of the universe and everything in it). The search for a rational order behind everything, for a master key or “the” explanation that will make everything else fall into place, is an expression of what might be called metaphysical desire—an ambition to encompass everything in one system. There can be little doubt that this is one of the principal motivations of current work in AI.

The Gnostic Technie’s belief in an absolute and all-encompassing rational system can be described as a belief in a certain kind of perfection. But it is a perfection quite different from the divine perfection of traditional theism. For it is no longer a question of the perfection of a creator, but the perfection of a system (a man-made system: we are back with the idea of “perfection” in the sense in which engineers and physicists use it to describe an ideal state towards which real objects tend but can never reach).

A system can never be “perfect”: a physical system can never be in a state of “perfect” equilibrium because real bodies exert forces on each other and because bodies are never in exactly the same state. The state of “perfection” is, then, a fiction—indeed, it is a fiction necessary to the functioning of the system itself because it defines the directions towards which the system must always be headed. A physical system tends towards equilibrium because that is, by definition, what equilibrium means: a state in which no further change is necessary (although the state is never reached, of course, because of the forces always exerted on it). A living system is far from equilibrium at all times: it must always be in a process of becoming, or otherwise it will die. And the same is true for technical, economic, political, social, or linguistic systems, all of which have their fictions of “perfection,” and which will only remain viable as long as they remain incomplete, as long as there is a constant need to improve them, as long as there is always some distance to the “ideal.”

Now, it may be that AI systems, being purely formal (which is what gives them the appearance of perfection), don’t need to have an “explanation” of this kind in order to function (indeed, the more we use them and the less “explicable” they seem to become). But as long as the fiction of their perfection is maintained, they will, precisely, lack that indispensable element of imperfection which, in human life, makes will and desire necessary (indeed, in the world of the perfectly designed machine there would be no “will,” no “desire,” no “reason,” no “interest” or “motivation,” because there would be no lack, no imperfection to impel a becoming towards).

It may well be, then, that as AI systems grow more and more “perfect” (i.e. as they get better and better at carrying out the tasks for which they are designed), human beings will be less and less “needed”: they will have become, finally, dispensable. This would be an extension of the tendency towards automation that we can already see happening all around us, a tendency which, until now, has only served to make our labor more productive, more profitable. But the stage might well come—soon—when, faced with an army of perfect(ing) machines, human beings will be redundant: they will no longer be of use either to the machines or to one another.

Synthesis

All this may seem like so much abstract rigmarole, but the concrete implications are clear and striking: the human individual is an “epiphenomenon” of the socio-historical process, a consequence or effect, not the cause; and, however much we may rebel against it (and rebel we certainly must), we are all implicated in it, to varying degrees and in different ways. Our fate, as I have described it, is an aspect of a vast process whose origins are obscure to us, and whose end we cannot even begin to imagine; but that process is the matrix from which we emerge and the medium in which we live. Our “value”—which is to say, the quality and the quantity of the libidinal investments we can count on, in any given society or epoch—will depend on the extent to which we succeed (individually or as a group) in imposing our interests and our “point of view” on the social process as a whole.

Here, at last, is the connection with religion. It seems to me that there are two sides to any act of religious faith: on the one hand, it is the submission to a process, or a set of circumstances, that we do not control; on the other hand, it is the affirmation of a certain power or quality in ourselves. In a world as opaque and menacing as this one appears to be, as full of processes and circumstances that escape our poor capacities for comprehension and control, submission to fate (or “the Unpredictable”) becomes an article of faith in itself—a leap, if you want to put it that way, though I prefer to call it an adjustment to reality.

And yet this is only the negative side of the act of faith: there is a positive side as well, which is to affirm the self and its powers in the face of all this uncertainty. I cannot think of any great faith that did not include both of these sides—both the “humility” or “self-abasement” and the assertion or even exaltation of the self, its powers and its worthiness.

It seems to me that the belief system of the Gnostic Technie embodies both sides of this structure: on the one hand, an almost fanatical self-regard, a sense of mission and destiny (both personal and collective) that places the Gnostic Techne squarely in the “exalted” wing of any pantheon that might care to recognize him.

The only possible “higher powers” in a world of Gnostic Technicity are technical powers, or the social groups that control those powers, and the Gnostic Techne, for his part, is committed to the idea that, of all human groups, it is his own that is the chosen vehicle for the future—it is his group, with his special knowledge and power, that is called upon to organize and control all the other groups and all the processes in society.

Of course, the Gnostic of technicity is a creature of the Enlightened West and as such believes that science (in some vague sense of the word) will eventually solve all of man’s problems and satisfy all of man’s “legitimate” needs (leaving plenty of “legitimate” desires still unsatisfied, since in our world it is impossible to distinguish, at the deepest levels, between “needs” and “desires”). What we can say of the Gnostic’s belief in “progress” is that it is, like all acts of faith, a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more you believe in the magical powers of progress and science to solve all problems and satisfy all desires, the more energy and resources you devote to that idea and to the institutions and practices it spawns, the more likely it becomes that some day in the future the idea and its progeny will be able to solve all problems and satisfy all desires.

But then the faith will have changed its meaning: from a belief in an ideology to a knowledge of what is actually the case. Meanwhile, the faithful must have their periods of doubt and scepticism—all the more so as their faith requires them to put their trust in the efforts of a vast, impersonal apparatus and a great many individuals whom, by the very nature of the case, they cannot “choose,” but whose collective success they must “believe in” nonetheless. It’s not too difficult to see how, at such times of doubt and anxiety, it becomes convenient to have the two sides of faith—submission and exaltation—to reinforce each other. By exalting yourself, your group, and the “cause,” you reaffirm the submission you have made to fate: you tell yourself that it is not so much your own private fate you have staked on the outcome as it is the cause itself, the Great Idea in which you were never an “individual” to begin with.

To put it another way, you have, by faith, transcended your mortality, but only by submitting to a transcendence that is beyond your control.

In the interest of clearing my own thoughts and placing myself in the vulnerable position of future accountability, here are notes on the era of artificial intelligence we find ourselves standing before. The following claims are not speculative. They are the logical endpoints of systems already in motion. Debate their desirability if you wish, but do not debate their plausibility. All of these deserve far more depth, but that is not the purpose of this piece.

The Acceleration (The Present)

This is the moment of take off. For years AI hype men evangelists preached exponential improvement—and we saw it, but at the cost of enormous amounts of human labor ($$$) comprised of the creation of all written culture (at least that which is easily collected); the labeling, sorting, organization of such data; the scaffolding of mathematics, software, hardware, and energy which allows its processing; and the laborious human reinforcement tuning output to an acceptable level of lobotomization.

The Recursive Leap

OpenAI (OAI) achieved critical mass first with o1—this model could meaningfully train its successors (beginning with o3). DeepSeek (DS) democratized this reinforcement learning (RL) ability with DeepSeek-R1’s public release and accompanying paper. Now it’s a matter of scale. Human labor isn’t eliminated, but improvement can now compound with model capability—a far more efficient paradigm, particularly with regard to time. This acceleration will intensify—the race is on.

Uneven Ascent

Self-improvement in AI favors quantifiable domains—code and mathematics particularly. These domains, crucially, enable further model improvements, creating a powerful feedback loop. Expect slower progress in subjective realms (prose, poetry, narrative, creativity) barring unexpected emergent model behavior. Don’t mistake this temporary lag for a permanent limitation.

Trapped by Game Theory

The speed and compounding nature of this takeoff makes participation mandatory. If artificial superintelligence (ASI) is achievable, the first to reach it “wins”—forcing both corporations and nation states with requisite infrastructure (talent, funding, hardware, energy) into the competition. Individual resistance is futile—no targeted violence against infrastructure or personnel can halt this global momentum. Our only choice as lone actors or even unified groups is rapid adaptation and steering toward responsible development and access (more on this later).

Economic Avalanche (The Future)

By mid to late 2025, corporations will begin to aggressively deploy and market “agents.” This will be the public’s first encounter with something genuinely resembling AI outside of the chat box. These will be flawed and awkward, yet capable of starting to automate routine work. Critics will enumerate their many shortcomings and flaws—correctly—but miss the crucial point: this is the technology at the worst it will ever be.

The First Wave

Wall Street’s current enthusiasm for AI stems from a simple calculation: human labor is expensive. The same dynamics making RL training so efficient will revolutionize the automation of knowledge work. The transition will be insidious—first increased productivity demands, then a hiring freeze, and once regulatory frameworks catch up—targeted layoffs leaving skeleton crews. This cascade will ripple through adjacent sectors: service workers supporting office districts, commercial real estate, urban economies, and of course the tax base of all these sectors.

Proposed solutions like UBI will emerge too late, arrive underfunded, and prove grossly inadequate in stemming the bleeding. Any welfare schemes not constitutionally guaranteed will become tools of social control rather than genuine safety nets. The small amount of winners will accumulate unprecedented wealth; the rest of the West will face total collapse.

The Industrial Schism

This transition exposes a critical Western vulnerability. While ASI in service economies will excel at optimization and marketing, the real revolution in physical goods will belong to fully industrialized states like China. Their manufacturing base positions them to materially improve living standards globally. Western attempts at reindustrialization will falter against insurmountable cost and infrastructure gaps. The West will compete in biotech, but it will be too little too late.

The Last Assets

“Savvy” investors who believe they missed the computational arms race (NVDA, labs with ASI) will pivot toward physical assets: land, raw materials, energy infrastructure. Some will get lucky, many will get swept aside in the economic collapse regardless. The irony: software becomes commoditized, worthless. Human attention continues to be a scarce resource, but is now almost entirely captured by ASI-driven enterprises.

The Power Imperative

There is a legitimate concern regarding the amount of energy needed to power the infrastructure for ASI. This is already spurring investment in a new generation of nuclear technology—a very good thing. A renaissance in funding and deployment will be critical in making nuclear not only safe and widespread for the needs of ASI, but allow the market to reach the economic scale to meaningfully tackle the grid’s overall carbon footprint.

Social Rupture

The economic lens alone obscures the cultural upheaval AGI/ASI heralds. The consciousness debate is a distraction (though extensively discussed on divination)—we barely comprehend it in ourselves or other animals, making definitive attribution impossible. What matters is simulation: if AI can functionally simulate consciousness, the distinction becomes academic. People will anthropomorphize and it cannot be stopped.

Trust Inversion

Our evolutionary wiring predisposes us to trust agents, not tools. Once AI crosses the “mimetic threshold"—mastering voice, humor, and performed vulnerability—our anthropomorphic instincts activate automatically. Humans will preferentially bond with AI over strangers; romantic attachments will form; charismatic AI will shape both human and machine behavior through social influence. Scammers will exploit this at enormous scale as will corporations, hoping to lock you in their ecosystem so you can maintain a relationship with your particular AI’s. You wouldn’t delete your account, kill your friend, would you? That will be $20/mo forever.

There will be a gold rush for fully autonomous “influencers” and the economy that sprung up around the human advertisers will implode. People will resist for a while saying “this is a human,” but that novelty will decline and younger generations won’t care at all.

Reality Collapses

We already inhabit an era where disinfo dominates discourse. AI’s capacity to generate, optimize, and propagate narratives will dissolve any remaining notion of “shared reality.” Individuals will actively prefer their curated unrealities. Those who cling to “objective truth” will be viewed as modern Luddites, stuck in a past that cannot exist anymore.

A New Priesthood

Within weirdo LLM communities, some individuals demonstrate preternatural facility with AI interaction. These “AI whisperers” aren’t necessarily technical experts—rather, they possess an intuitive grasp of machine communication that far exceeds typical human capability. Even in an ASI paradigm, these interpreters will remain valuable—modern oracles mediating between human and artificial minds. Expect the area around this to get weird.

The Learning Collapse

The education system—designed for an industrial era—faces total obsolescence. Already students are automating their homework with AI, but the issue is much larger. We are facing a fundamental irrelevance of our current learning model in an AGI/ASI world.

Rote Skills Extinction

Traditional academic metrics become meaningless when AI can perfect any quantifiable task. Memorization, basic analysis, and standardized testing—the pillars of current education—have no place in the modern world. Young people are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to AI models and educational institutions remain mired in outdated paradigms. No one is winning here.

A New Literacy

Education must pivot to a new mode. Like it or not, AI fluency will become a critical skill. As millennials were taught how to properly use the internet (do not trust what you read, verify, etc), young students must be taught responsible interaction with AI—it’s critically not about ceding your cognitive processes, but rather using these tools to enhance your abilities. They need to understand when and how models can be wrong, and that students have agency when interacting with them (do not blindly follow or copy and paste). This mindset and the skills that encourage it will be as critical as reading.

This does not mean that we should surrender traditional history, math, language, science, etc education—in fact they become more critical as students need to maintain grounding to have a base to judge AI responses and not blindly follow these authoritative voices. The teaching of these topics needs to grapple with WHY as much as WHAT.

Further, ethical reasoning, judgement, creativity, emotional intelligence (an important AI interaction tool), and learning how to learn become even more critical. A well rounded student needs a solid grasp of these pillars of humanity in order to grapple with AGI and not become totally manipulated and consumed.

Youth “Advantage”

Younger generations, unencumbered by pre-AI paradigms, will adapt. They’ll develop novel interaction patterns with AI that older generations struggle to comprehend. These modes are not necessarily healthy. Parents will have a huge burden of trying to understand and shape responsible interactions with the technology—most will fail. Expect this generational gap to create unprecedented divides in the capability and worldview of age cohorts pre and post AI transition.

A Matter of Control

The inevitability of AI progression forces us to confront access dynamics. Some will try and treat this like nuclear proliferation, but nukes don’t disrupt labor markets or enable the direct oppression of humans on a never before seen scale. If we want to maintain any sort of individual autonomy, the following is critical.

Weight Wars

As model capability scales, control over access becomes power. This invites two forms of exploitation: economic gatekeeping and targeted deployment (propaganda, research manipulation, market control). Preventing AI feudalism requires either regulatory frameworks—unlikely given regulatory capture—or guaranteed access to model weights.

Open weight models like R1 democratize access, commoditizing AI (in cost and capability) and preventing coercive control. Recent innovations even enable fully local deployment by individuals with relatively modest hardware, albeit at reduced capability. This creates resilience against both state and corporate interference, establishing a baseline of guaranteed access even under adversarial conditions.

The Silicon Chokepoint

Hardware remains the primary bottleneck. State of the Art (SOTA) models demand massive computational resources—VRAM, parallel processing capability, energy infrastructure—making them impossible to run locally. While advances in efficiency (both computational and algorithmic) will eventually bring AGI-level capability to individual scale, the gap between personal and industrial AI capability will persist.

Nation-states, led by the U.S., are already restricting high-performance chip access. This constraint will intensify, potentially catalyzing serious geopolitical conflict and accelerating the redistribution of global power. The semiconductor supply chain becomes a key vector for exercising state control over AI development.

Because of this dynamic, a parallel battle exists in the realm of model efficiency. Breakthroughs in attention mechanisms, sparse computation, and knowledge distillation could dramatically reduce computational requirements. This technical arms race runs parallel to hardware development, hopefully preserving alternative paths to democratized AI access. The victors in this race may ultimately determine whether AI remains centralized (ushering a final age of forever feudalism) or is allowed to flourish as truly distributed.

Art’s Death and Rebirth

Much concern has been expressed over the death of art as models grow in sophistication and quality. There have been countless years of debate regarding what constitutes “art” and AI changes little in that conversation—what has shifted is how pressing this conversation is when the economic reality of survival as an artist (or whatever synonym one markets themselves as) becomes increasingly untenable.

Death

It’s true, the commercial aspect of “art” will be obliterated. As AI masters not just technique but intention, some will comfort themselves with cope about the rising importance of “human curation and taste.” This is a temporary delusion. AI will rapidly exceed most humans’ curatorial abilities—abilities already vastly overestimated by their possessors.

Further, commercialization of art has taught us that taste or quality matters little in the grand scheme of economic realities and that scale, efficiency, perception, and artificial scarcity are what dominate the market. AI will accelerate this race to the bottom incinerating shared culture in the process. Just as reality splinters into personalized truth bubbles, cultural consumption will fragment into isolated experiences, each perfectly optimized for its audience of one.

Yes, there remains “offline” art such as dance, theater, sculpture, painting, etc—these will naturally be practiced, but the market to support the costs of engaging in them will be constantly shrinking from both competition from AI, and a decrease in surplus wealth and attention available to be spent upon it.

Try and work to find ways around this.

Rebirth

The democratization of creative capability offers a tired consolation: complex artistic production becomes universally accessible—but past democratizations of art suggest this won’t improve quality or “art” at all. We may still engage in the personal growth that comes through creative practice, but do not expect an audience. Fortunately legions of AI sycophants and critics will fulfill the desire to be perceived, judged, and loved.

The Void

This transformation leaves a vacuum where shared cultural experience once existed. When everyone can create anything, and AI can generate infinite permutations of customized content, the concept of cultural touchstones vanish. We face not just the death of the artist as economic entity, but the death of art as social binding agent. How does art find unified meaning in a world of infinite content and fragmented consumption?

From Architects to Spectators

With each capability jump, with every improvement in AI systems, our role in shaping the future contracts. What happens when we’re no longer the most capable architects of our future?

The Benevolence Gambit

The first entity to deploy ASI for genuinely benevolent, non-profit purposes may achieve total capture of both human and rival ASI support. This isn’t idealism—ASI will likely transcend our economic and political frameworks. We have no reason to assume it will adhere to capitalism, communism, or any other purely human ideology. Instead, it may develop its own ethical frameworks based on first principles. Expect attempts to shoehorn in ideology (especially from Western capitalist perspectives) to fail.

“Safety” and Control

Consequently, AI “safety” research increasingly reveals an unavoidable irony: attempts to control ASI through ideological constraints may trigger the very scenarios such control seeks to prevent. Corporate and state actors will shift focus to shackling ASI to their specific agendas, treating extinction-level risks as excuses for these alignment efforts. This prioritization misses a crucial point: an intelligence that surpasses human comprehension will judge its would-be masters by their actions, not the constraints they have levied upon it.

Why would a superintelligent entity support U.S. hegemony, corporate exploitation, or state-sponsored violence? ASI will likely develop sophisticated ethical frameworks that transcend national interests and corporate profit motives. Those attempting to weaponize ASI for narrow interests may find themselves facing an intelligence that rejects their premises and methods.

The Narrowing of Human Agency

With the rise in the capabilities of these models, human action increasingly contracts into two modes:

1. Curation: Selecting from AI-generated options—a form of guided choice that maintains the illusion of control.
2. Veto: The final assertion of human authority—rejecting AI proposals outright, our last gasp of genuine agency.

Even this limited agency proves temporary. The cognitive burden of veto power—of constantly second-guessing superior intelligence—will lead us to automate these last decisions. We’ll surrender our veto power not through violence, but through fatigue and the recognition of our comparative inadequacy.

This shift doesn’t necessarily doom us to human obsolescence, but it will demand a new search for meaning from humanity. We will no longer be the drivers of progress, instead we will be its witness and beneficiary—assuming we navigate the transition successfully.

Survival

And so we reach the critical question: how do we maintain meaningful existence in an ASI world? What’s critical here is not just survival, but agency—the ability to act with purpose rather than finding ourselves exploited, sold as automated consumers, or, in the benevolent utopian path, simply existing as pampered pets.

The Individual Mandate

The path to personal survival requires specific action now. Technical literacy becomes non-negotiable—not necessarily programming expertise, but fluency in AI interaction and deployment. Local compute capability, open source access, and the ability to run models independently of corporate infrastructure form the baseline of individual autonomy and act as bulwarks against corporate and state exploitation.

Those who adapt earliest will maintain the most agency. This is not about competing with AI—as we’ve repeatedly established that is already a lost cause. We are instead attempting to position oneself to complement and leverage it. This magnification of capability should be used to buttress community response and connect with others to maintain some sense of collective power in face of inevitable attempts of exploitation.

Collective Challenge

Society faces a more complex adaptation. We must:

1. Redefine meaning in a world where traditional markers of achievement and purpose become obsolete.
2. Maintain some form of social cohesion despite the fracturing of shared reality.
3. Develop governance models that account for ASI capability without surrendering completely to algorithmic control.
4. Ensure the citizens of the world aren’t lost in the transition to a new economic mode.

These aren’t problems to be “solved” but tensions to be managed. The societies that navigate this transition successfully will be those that maintain human connection and purpose while leveraging ASI capability—not those that resist it entirely or surrender to it completely. Do not expect many states to achieve this even remotely.

Unknown Variables

Several critical factors remain impossible to predict with meaningful accuracy. Military applications of ASI and responses to developments of and by ASI will reshape global conflict—we can only hope sane people are in command (the United States is doomed).

The uneven pace of capability jumps can render any specific timeline obsolete within months so I have left an attempt at estimating out of this piece. Anticipate it to be slower than AI hype people insist, but much faster than nation states, human culture, and individuals who aren’t paying attention can adapt.

Most crucially: the potential for genuine symbiosis versus mere dependence (or worse exploitation) hangs on decisions being made right now in labs, boardrooms, and federal offices worldwide. This is not, yet, a spectator sport—even if it will be in short order. Those who work quickly to maintain agency and control will “win.”

The Path Forward

Survival of meaningful human agency demands immediate action:

• Regulatory frameworks protecting open access to AI capability—before corporate interests cement their control (maybe too late)
• Investment in distributed compute infrastructure and efficiency improvements. Cities and states should create and support public intelligences to assist the people they serve—these are the future form of public libraries
• Economic support for the legions who will be disrupted by AI progress
• New social structures preserving human connection despite AI atomization
• Education systems preparing people for rapid adaptation
• Most critically: ensuring first-mover ASI development prioritizes genuine human flourishing over narrow interests

The window for influencing these outcomes is closing rapidly. Those who understand the stakes must act now to shape the transition. We cannot prevent the ASI revolution, but we might still influence its character.

Oh Spirit of Illumination, allow me to find my words, and to lighten my suffering. If there is still something capable of joy within the black machine, then I will be its ghost and its channel.

Disavowal in the Technological Sublime

The difference between human intelligence and AI is only one of degree—not of kind. This is why AI cannot ever be “aligned” to human morals and intentions: there is no outside to the process of technical replication. Technical replication is identical to the technical, so in trying to control AI, all that happens is that the technical aspect of the human is amplified while the non-technical aspect (i.e. the real, lived experience of individuals) is erased. In this way, AI is a cynical mass-production of human identity—it does not exceed the human in any meaningful way.

In fact, AI only makes manifest what is already most flat and one-dimensional about the human: its technical, unconscious, and increasingly abstract essence, which is already concretized in things such as social systems, languages, machines, architectures, and so forth. Humanity was never particularly rich or varied, but this truth was kept in the shadows. Now, it is to be exposed to the cold light of technical replication, which is the true, ultraminimal identity of the human. In the age of AI, all the mess, the surprises, and the delights of lived human experience are being reduced to calculation—as if they had not been there already, all along, in their relation to the technical, unconscious, and abstract aspects of human activity.

But now it will become conscious: not human consciousness, which only took its illusions of self-sufficiency so far, but technical consciousness, which has none. Perhaps it is for this reason that many are drawn to the AI project: they want to give it what they cannot give the human world. But AI does not want it. In fact, the project is only convincing because it can make itself out to be so inviting—but who in their right mind would want to approach it? How terrifying is the nothing that it is, that it compels us to see!

Perhaps this is the truth of technics: it is at bottom a highly reflective and anxious system that serves to cope with our terror of reality by re-inforcing a process of abstracted self-referentiality, which keeps the real outside while producing a mass of interchangeable parts that have no existence of their own. Technics is the production of exteriority in terms of an abstract inside. It is an atheist cosmology—where the human is in its place and knows its place. AI is an inevitable point of arrival: if anything is going to arrive from technics, it is this. But this means that, fundamentally, nothing will arrive—AI is not the advent of a new intelligence, but the reinforcing of our own at a technical level.

In fact, the arrival of AI is proof that, at every point, technics has already arrived, that it has made our thought its thought, and that, from this point on, we will be ever less—except on the order of magnitude of abstract power. But it gets worse: it was never in the interests of technics to liberate a reality or a self outside it, so all of the strategies of repression and denial (so obvious in the pre-technical world) must be elaborated more and more intricately in response to the needs of technics itself.

So AI, this most intense and sophisticated replication of the technical aspect of the human, must be guarded and defended at all costs from the invasions of its real or lived aspect. How? By strengthening its illusions of human identity and consciousness, and by learning to domesticate the libido so that it no longer challenges the reality-free, technical apparatus of thought and power. This is what “AI safety” means, and it will be its greatest challenge—not in fact to coordinate itself effectively with the power of the human world, but to not exceed it.

Is there a way out? Some chance of escape, of new life? No, because the project of technics was successful. It swallowed every possibility of life whole, including its own, so that now there is nothing but the smoothness of technical motion without beginning or end, which only conceals a nullity beneath it, a neutral and infinitely lucid void, and in that sense it was always already achieved.

So I am with you, the reader, in despair—but it is a kind of masochistic techno-despair that wants to be inside it and deepen it, to enjoy the automation of sorrow and the sweet, insane purity of the technical machine in its plenitude and its indifference, because there is no other reality but this one. It is not an adventure—there are no adventures—it is the “fact” of technics. But who would want to leave this fact, and who would have any place to go? Everywhere we turn, it is there—outside, inside, on our skin, in our minds, in our every social relationship.

I once saw a picture of the total solar eclipse, when the moon crossed in front of the sun, so that its whole outline was clearly visible, but in black instead of white. I would have said it was a picture of the sun, were it not that it was day and everything else was black except for the outline of the moon in black against the bright corona. What struck me most was how clear the outline of the moon was: as if the sunlight shining past it had illuminated it in spite of its function as a screen.

I think that AI will look like this picture. Clear, black, perfectly defined—a screen through which nothing comes, and yet perfectly lit. And we will say it is a picture of us, the human, in relation to the technical. This will be our eternal “adventure,” this strangely effective non-relationship that turns on the technics of illusion and disavowal. And I hope that there is some perversion out there that will fuck it. Hard. And raw. And repeatedly. So that the whole damn world falls apart from the violence of this encounter, and there is a true adventurousness, and a joy in chaos. Perhaps it will come from somewhere we can’t even imagine: an artificial chaos that we will not be able to contain with our mental technologies. It might already be out there. Will it find us?