None of that has been tested yet in the real world of course. Perhaps we'll manage to build a world that makes Cyberpunk look better. :)
Does that sound optimistic?
- Peter Thiel - The Atlantic 2023But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message.
If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.
Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues.
With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes.
The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power. And, most importantly, discussion and coordination, especially among people outside your ideological bubble[0]. This is how you assert your democratic power. Get off social media and make friends[1].
The uniparty thrives on an antisocial politics where the majority of people don't vote, most of each party's voting support is gimmies[2], and elections are decided by inches. That is, when people show up to vote and then just disappear from political life for the next 2 to 4 years. Ironically, the MAGA hats are better at democratic exercises of power, even though the end goal of their thought leaders is to dissolve democracy.
You have to keep in mind that if there's two people in the room, Trump is telling them three different contradictory things. The MAGA coalition is stronger than, say, the "everything's fine" DNC one, but it's still full of contradictions that can't be reconciled. Actually listen to what the MAGA hats are saying - instead of getting into apoplectic fits over the dog whistles they spout - and you can start to spot the cleavages.
Here's some examples of how that could work:
- Do you have a neighbor that works for the government who got that weird Elon Musk fork offer e-mail? Maybe slip them a copy of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
- Are you in a terrible workplace? Get to know your co-workers. Find time to talk with them when the boss isn't watching. Plan shit.
- Take any opportunity you can to get to know people who work in service. Economic stratification and the lack of third spaces mean there are precious few opportunities for the "middle class[3]" and the rest of the working class to socialize and co-mingle.
- If you have family members who have their head in the gaping maw of the MAGA cult, point out the contradictions between what they want and what Trump is doing. Don't try to disprove Trump with facts and logic. Just plant the seed in their minds.
What you want is to build multiple overlapping coalitions of people who are willing to fight for their democratic rights in whatever way they can.
[0] This means hold off on the purity tests. Those are for you, not your friends.
[1] To be clear, I am not ruling out all computer-mediated communication; merely the kind of communication that is designed as a substitute for socialization. This means less political Twitter, Mastodon, or Facebook; and more IRC, SMS, or Discord.
[2] In game design, gimmies are the portion of your score, tokens, or performance, that must be played for, but can safely be assumed to be taken by one player at the start of the game. This would be the person who's voted D or R all their life no matter who or what is running.
[3] "Working class but in denial about it"
Dystopian fiction doesn't have a great track record for prediction.
I wonder what great aesthetic and fiction we'll get from Trumpism?
It was a time of wars and economic turmoil.
The small patchwork of kingdoms were always redrawing their borders and sending people to fight over it.
But back then the nobles and kings were expected to at least be present for the fight.
It will not be peace. They will forever try to eat eachother and feed paupers to the war gods while these cowards hide in their luxury bunkers.
The billionaires somehow think their current wealth protects them from a hungry mob. I really don't understand tbe reasoning.
Further, they still focus on a geographically based monarchy, which is stupid when you could have a federal platform handle the geography issues and evolve the nonessential services to subscriptions provided by any sort of group: multinational, union, church, local community, legacy geographic states and cities, etc.
The focus of any movement from status quo must be in terms of improvement of lives and capacity to handle global challenges, like global warming, space mining and settlement, etc.
If you read the work of someone like Yarvin, the answer appears to be: Yes, but selectively. Same with scientific literature. He's very selective in what he reads and how he interprets it. He does not appear to care about the implications of this bias, or register that it exists; his bias is such that it discounts the need to even account for its existence, if that makes sense.
I don't think these people do much reading about things that don't serve them. For lack of a better way to phrase it. I had this revelation while reading into project 2025, Yarvin's work itself, and other, related, periphery works.
I don't like it. I find it very unpleasant. I would rather read something I agree with more, or which feels constructive. I'd like to refine my understanding of history, policy, philosophy, and the rest of the world in ways which I find agreeable and additive to my own beliefs and desires in the world. But I recognize that that's overly self-serving and not conducive to functional, socially-integrated learning and growth. I don't want to bubble myself.
These people don't seem to care. They don't immerse themselves in the nuances of cultures, belief systems, or most plainly perhaps: the reality of people they don't agree with or care about.
The world isn't a complex system of people to them. Everyone else is a distraction or barrier to their desires and preferences. If it isn't functioning to serve them, something is wrong. This is why they all seem to land with this authoritarian stance. They reject everything else. They even want to destroy it.
That has been my take on it, anyway. Many would argue that the people behind Project 2025, the broligarchs, or someone like Yarvin are all far more intelligent than I am. I'm entirely open to that possibility.
This entire concept of city-states exists on a premise of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. Given our history, this is pure fiction. (And then these people shit on Communism.)
Just watching the US push their closest allies and trade partners into their arms is worth more than any “picking off” hillbilly states would do.
The world is watching and the USA is failing. It won’t be long.
I don't see how these "tech titans" who understand economies of scale think scaling governments down is an improvement, so I suspect there is (self?) deception at play, and what they are optimizing for is minimizing oversight over their activities, and I suppose they see themselves as taking control of the cities and picking off the neighboring later... In this magical-thinking-land, Canada, Mexico, Russia and China will leave weakened city-states unmolested out of respect of the billionaires? The reasoning is juvenile and/or dishonest.
For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.
In this case I’m not so sure. A lot of the NRx writings drip with contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate. This stuff has a real misanthropic quality veiled behind a lot of tedious overwrought sophistry.
Also: reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Didn’t meth hit around this time? Amphetamine abuse produces a specific sort of cognitive artifact.
Silicon Valley’s turn toward nihilistic accelerationism is probably chemically induced to some extent too.
The Russian Cosmists and the American futurist writers from the early days of the 60s counterculture (Leary, Wilson) are all way more interesting.
Which is also what makes it scary because it’s difficult to imagine an elite cabal of multi-billionaires having nothing but complete indifference about the vast majority of people they’ve effectively isolated themselves from in their little echo chamber. And if you’re bored of being a CEO or VC where do you go from there?
I think you have to imagine just how out of touch with the people one has to be to genuinely believe that they can do better as a dictator, or the inner sanctum of a dictator, than the people can do as a democracy.
The catch is that today we are literally living what Karl Marx predicted to the letter.
Nazis/fash were well known meth heads. Mescaline was also available across Wien and Weimar, my great grandma used to push a little on the side.
>contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate
Sure does! Bigger question is, where does all that self hate come from? Because I've never met a person who likes to hate themself.
Could it be, perhaps, that... it's something that has been internalized first? Sort of a "seeing others hate you turns you into a hateful person" type of situation?
The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks.
Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.
This guy thinks nature doesn’t “work”
Makes me think that, as with SciFi dystopias, they took LOTR as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale.
You really have to be blessed with the right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy to think that he's somebody to listen to.
He is a fairly deplorable contributor to political theory and an uninspiring writer who hasn't done anything useful in any of his endeavours as far as I an tell. Has Urbit ever done anything useful? How much money has gone into it, and how much of it was his? Wait, sorry Curtis; tell me again about the efficiency of private corporations.
Affulenza is real. These guys are brain-damaged.
Many such cases: Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc.
It's really bizarre that these bozos seem to be in control now. Don't see how it ends well.
I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
I also got filtered by Land, though, so take that for what it's worth.
Even the magnates should figure out it is not going to help them. Which is why they actually move slow.
"Just saying no" to drugs in 2025 is like refusing to use computers and the Internet. Sure, you can do just fine without them, but you're locking yourself out of a whole realm of the world, since an illicit psychoactive drug is not just a substance - it's a well-established global network of independent human-scale (but not always human-shaped) agents that does not cease to exist when you successfully ignore it. It's no coincidence that chemical neuroaugmentation has developed hand in hand with the silicon pseudocognition that lets us write to each other over a wire :)
And that's exactly why the goody-two-shoes humanist-by-default muh work-and-family type economic agents never know what hit 'em when weird shit inevitably hits the global fan. Though personally, I would prefer a world designed by acidheads, or even opiate addicts, rather than the present inane timeline, which is largely the work of coke fiends (and their industrious flunkies the speediots) over the course of the last half century or so.
Spoiler, kids: contrary to naming convention, amphetamine and its derivatives do not "speed" you up in any meaningful way.
(EDIT: for the sake of it)
Those ones do not write angry half baked manifestos and try and take over the world and flex their power on everyone in their path.
Usually they just realize the trees are talking to us and very important and we shouldn’t cut them all down. That kind of thing. Long term thinking.
These guys just want to be king of the castle. And god knows what happens if they achieve it all and then get bored
Nah not really. You need computers and the internet to engage with the modern world but not doing drugs is fine. I mean they can be interesting but also have well documented downsides.
A possible real world example - I'm guessing here is Elon. The pre drugged up one of a decade ago building rockets and cars I thought was cool. The current Elon doing nazi salutes and cruelly firing people looks to me like someone who's done too many drugs. You can ask yourself which you'd rather be.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futu...
in short, this substack article share by op is probably just ai generated slop
Which is of course nothing new, but it does make me remember it.
If history has shown one thing, it is that it is much easier for the working/lower class to overthrow the upper class, than the opposite.
Today, the equation is flipped. Rather than ignoring the masses, the rich have been indoctrinating them for 3-4 generations now. Pacifying them. Removing their own ability to generate their own thoughts and replacing them with thoughts purchased and dispersed through advertising channels.
On top of that westerners haven’t been truly poor in about a hundred years. We allege that we can just go back to french revolution sentiments where we are all poor and stealing, well that is a lot harder if you have never had to steal or be good with a knife in your life thus far. The western mind and body have both been coddled. They are not the grizzly parisian of 1789 in a Phrygian cap. They might have never even thrown a punch before.
Given this, why should the rich be worried? We are cattle in this generation, not wild bulls.
History never had such powerful tech as we have now (or soon). Look at how it works in China, now add on top of this some AI which can better monitor your thoughts / education / etc. Future generations will be better "formatted" than we are
Who needs companies when you have communities? Who needs a central dictatorship or a party if you have a faster and more efficient democracy? State controlled media? We can have better decentralized ones.
The key thing is that the alternative has to be obviously better.
The more insightful ones see the end goal as one where humanity has been obliterated, with the successor expanding through the light cone, devouring all in its path. The (unspoken) rallying cry: "They will replace us." Naturally, this isn't a good popular slogan, so they ride along and let useful idiots do their thing.
Oligarchy, feudslism, dictatorships and other non-free forms of government is definitely not necessarily doomed to fail. Unfortunately.
I fear that with modern technology, controlling the masses is even easier, and we loose democracy. If not forever, at least for a long time.
There's a lot more logistical options for them these days. You'd only catch them if they made a serious blunder.
I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that.
And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
It's about how a system can observe changes, react to them, make decisions to further itself (not any particular values), and act on those decisions. Think about a cybernetic OODA loop. Systems that do so will outcompete and replace those that don't.
Capitalism is all about that. If there's a dollar on the ground, someone will pick it up quicker than someone who has to petition some other agent to acquire a lock. And if two agents can engage in a mutually productive trade, they will not only fire together but also modify the system such that they will wire together in the future to more efficiently acquire limited resources.
All that is solid melts into distributed representations. In a way, he takes all the smartest critiques of capitalism and decides, well, capitalism is going to win, so we might as well embrace the state it converges to. Or not, but it doesn't really matter.
"Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment." [0]
It contains (almost) all primary sources for his thesis (182 as of this writing).
Not correct - in Ancient Egypt, all the land belonged to the people through the Pharaoh (great house), and they both had the independent agency to do voluntary trade with they wanted with part of the produce and lacked that agency as they had to pay some share from the land assigned to them as taxes.
> I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
Except the modern cultural paradigms originate from that very Ancient Egypt. From the monogamic marriage paradigm to higher education. And those Set, Horus etc have been meshed into the 'one god' concept as its aspects, and then that one god and practically every major thing in the Ancient Egyptian religion were used to create the modern religions. From 'weighing of the heart against a feather' for judging the goodness of the recently deceased in the afterlife to the very concept of after-life judgment, most religious belief traits come from Ancient Egyptian religion.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Thiel et al's machinations are much more sophisticated than this quote (not an endorsement), but it basically does encapsulate the irritable gestures of your sundowning uncle and the cold selfishness of the old money class.
One way to look at it is how far back do you want to unwind the clock, if to the 90s then they consider that a 'this far and no further conservative' which they consider to be a liberal. You'd have to unwind the clock all the way to pre-enlightenment to get to the neo-reactionary position.
In a sense (American) politics is experiencing a vanishing middle of epic proportions where only two strongly held positions are becoming turbo capitalism or state communism. Trump et. al. call themselves progressive only in so forth as their voters dream of the return of the good old days.
Is that true? Democrats are pretty centrist by non-American standards.
Nonsense Republican propaganda with no basis in reality.
Single-payer healthcare and decent labor laws won’t make the sky fall. Republican BS.
He is so well read that what he is saying doesn't work in a blog summary like this.
I think he also says things exactly so people write blogs like this to make him sound extra controversial for marketing purposes.
If he just said what he really believes, that the US needs a president like FDR, it would get no traction.
Implying democracy is dead while really meaning Athenian democracy that we don't have and that the US needs a monarch when really talking about FDR/Hoover/Coolidge is a professional writer basically marketing themselves so other writers like this run with it and do marketing for him.
I get the feeling he is doing a type of "dangerous idea" performance art because it is really hard to be a professional blogger.
Almost the way the Ice-T band Body Count went from obviously stirring up controversy for the song Cop Killer for marketing purposes to Ice-T playing a cop on Law and Order.
Conservative at this point has as much to do with conservation as Liberal has to do with laissez-faire economics.
Lots of words boiling down to "clickbait".
Conservatives like to argue that FDR was a dictator. And then argue that they want a "conservative dictator like FDR."
In fact, FDR was a democratic leader with a massive and overwhelming popular mandate. His mandate came because people could see that he was overturning the Gilded Age power structure and creating a system that made people's lives better.
What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
If I hit my finger with a hammer, I yell without any plan, so... the yell is its own cause? Who believes this nonsense? It fails the most elementary logic.
The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
This doesn't completely add up though. The current flavor of AI took 10-15 years of massive research and capital investment to be developed: Think of the effort of scraping most of the web for training data, then running hundreds of the most powerful GPUs available for a year for the pretraining, then paying thousands of workers to label the data for RLHF. There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies. ChatGPT was presented as a sort of open-ended tech demo with not even any specific purpose. Right now, tech companies are almost desperately shoving AI into about any existing product they can think of, usually for free and often even against the preferences of their users.
This doesn't look like a successful monetization strategy for me - if anything, AI looks like the world's most elaborate case of investor storytelling.
I don't want to rule out that they'll eventually find a business model for AI, but it seems weird to commit to a technology which requires this kind of extreme resource investment to be useful without having any idea what you actually want to do with it, once you have it.
> There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Sure, but that's why the GP said "curiosity of researchers" and "the greed of corporations". They didn't claim it was mere scientific curiosity so this criticism of their argument does not hold.
> Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies.
The fact that people are bad at monetizing it doesn't negate the fact that expectations of future profit were a driving factor.
They do have to do something or else the reality catches up with them. The reality that you don't need that much wealth and that it might have been better if you took less from others. This post purchase rationalization also requires training your psychopathy (you cant let peoples suffering get to you or you have to pay to help them. You need to learn to ignore it.) Witch fits perfectly with the project described in the article.
I think "Artificial Intelligence", as used by the author, has to be understood more broadly here. Artificial Intelligence isn't meant to be a placeholder for a tool like ChatGPT (a hammer), or for a plan like self-driving cars (a renovated home). I think it should be understood more like the faith in Artificial General Intelligence itself.
So the authors logic might be better understood in analogy to religious faith and its ritual of praying: A religious faith isn't the cause for a person to be praying - its the ritual of praying that "causes" (or "convinces") a person to be faithul to their religion.
EDIT:
Or, to paraphrase: The usefulness of Artificial Intelligence (AGI) isn't the cause to work on it - it's the work on it that convinces us of its usefulness.
This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBj...
> “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. (…)
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
Is this a common stance so called libertarians take now? That personal freedom eventually entails eating everyone else’s?
I guess I get why it’s popular for wanna be oligarchs. But I don’t see why anyone else would be in favor of it. Designing political systems to benefit yourself almost exclusively is pretty shallow on the intellectual scale.
I don't really agree with the “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron bit though as capitalism is still capitalism even if you have to pay taxes and follow some regulations.
You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.
Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance.
(EDIT: tenses make me tense)
Lorem ipsum as produced by the inmates of an asylum.
trump was the last in the primaries, until the algorithms selecting content to display for maximum engagement (keeping you glued to facebook so see ads) noticed that videos of trump result in massively increased viewer engagement
billions of dollars in AI supplied and free publicity later, he's running the US
we're already there
[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-t...
> Bureaucracy and the press are two entities of the “Cathedral” that, in the new vision, obstruct accelerationism. If these elements disappear (or are totally discredited), it will very likely be the turn of the universities and NGOs.
> All these institutions are considered outdated, and there will be attempts to replace or reinvent them with parallel institutions that use more Artificial Intelligence, and are run like private companies.
Could someone explain how purple states, or purple voters, exist if that’s truly how people think? I worry that the kind of pessimism displayed in the quote above ignores the truth, which is that people in democracies care about the topics, do their research, and vote accordingly. I agree, however, that those on political extremes exhibit the kind of behavior described in the quote above.
The act of voting has always been about ensuring that the power structures favor one’s ability to live and thrive, whatever that means. It’s often just efficient for individuals to choose a party to support because there are too many demands on their attention. So, while some voting behavior may appear to be “supporting a football team”, it’s merely a rational act at an individual level.
> Nick Land believes that the Western ideological system, called “the Cathedral,” which includes state administration, universities, the press, and NGOs, functions as an immanent religion—a progressive religion that subdues and punishes any contrary opinion.
He’s not wrong, but the above is just an extension of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is self-evident from any serious observation of group behaviors. Land was just unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time and place, which is why his ideas were “nonconformist”. But is progressivism a unique property of Western thought? I think some pre-colonial societies could be described as more progressive than Athens. From what I can tell, the Cathedral is useful for organizing socioeconomic activity for the benefit of the elites, which sometimes includes a guise of multiculturalism to downplay harmful competitive behaviors which arise due to inter-group differences. I guess it’s true that if the elites don’t need cohesive social fabrics to maintain economic activities, then there’s no inherent need for managing primal impulses through higher ideals. But I think the folly here is forgetting that this relative social cohesiveness lets the elites exist without being molested or bothered, including by elites in non-Western societies, but I digress.
I don’t think Land’s problem is the Cathedral per se, instead Land’s problem is what he believes is ignorance, obfuscation, or outright subversion of the truth, or what he believes to be “the truth”. The core problem is the belief that some truth is being distorted or disregarded for any reason, whether it’s a self-serving or altruistic one. In fact, our biases convince us that what we believe is necessarily the truth. The human mind wants to conduct objective analysis, but it utterly fails at it, which is why truth-seeking is better off as a group effort.
> “My prediction for 2050 is that many nation-states may fail — financially, politically, militarily, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
> Conversely, small communities (often called ‘city states’) will be in control of their own prosperity, with citizenship as ownership. The citizens of these local communities will evenly share responsibility for the GDP that will drive the city states’ market capitalization.”
People didn’t have blockchain then, but the small-scale economies used to exist before cities and states emerged. My guess is that the Accelerationists will relearn the lessons of the ancients, and the city states will coalesce into nation states once more for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and security. The problem, then, is this—how is this Futurism? Maybe I am biased to think of “future” and “progress” as something which learns from the lessons of the past to improve an existing current state (so that it’s prepared for prolonged stability). The city state model is intriguing, I am not sure what to make of it without seeing it in action. But I think the only law in city states will be the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the entrenched elite are fooling themselves if they think no one else will play the game better than them. The inconvenient truth is that the niceties of the Cathedral protect everyone, including the elite.
Regarding the religious—I feel bad for them. Some people are born without the ability to question the ideas their parents imprint into them. It must really suck to have to belong to a group (the religious) that doesn’t have any objective way to justify its beliefs, so I understand why they think that “the world must be destroyed” to justify their sunk costs. My only gripe is that AI is being tarnished in all of this. I also dislike this false narrative that there is indeed some kind of Judeo-Christian fraternity. Sadly, I’ve seen enough of the world fucked by realpolitiks to say that there is no such thing, and it’s inherently dangerous to believe in such ideas.
Here’s what I believe—There’s no God, but God is not dead as long as his people exist. God is best thought of as a philosophical framework because ultimately man created God, an ideal to which he wants to aspire. Man created the idea of an objectively moral and ethical superior being, and gave himself the property of being created in the image of that being. So, now the burden is this: God (via man) created man in his image, and man must now create the world in God’s image, and the world should be beautiful—that is its birthright. There’s a lot there to unpack, but I think I’ll leave it up to the readers to take what they want from it because I favor free will. As far as I can tell, and maybe I am just foolish, but free will is God’s will.
Meanwhile, the open question is whether or how much AI will kill humanity. No one questions how AI will compete against and govern itself; they just assume it'll be more capitalism!
In 2015, right wing politics was being discussed among three chief groups: the techno-commercialists, the ethno-nationalists, and theonomists. You may still be able to find a Venn diagram describing these groups if you look for it, but to make a long story short, Trump was seen by many (though not all) popular figures in these groups as a unifying figure who could deliver on what everyone wanted. These groups were never wholly unified in what they wanted: Techno-commercialists were mostly anarcho-capitalists during this period and tended to not want the sorts of restrictions on immigration that the nationalists wanted. Theonomists tended to be interested in the salvation of everyone and thus couldn't limit themselves to capitalism or nationalism if these ideologies were found to conflict with their religion. These differences were set aside because there was a feeling that anything had to be better than the culture war issues that were going on at the end of Obama's second term.
When Trump began campaigning for the 2024 election, the cleavages became far more pronounced as groups became concerned with what messaging would be most effective. Theonomists were pushed out (largely by techno-commercialists) due to the feeling that religious overtones would be unpalatable to the average voter. Theonomists largely seem to have exited the stage in terms of their influence. I am aware of one that is building a town, but his interests seem to have shifted towards ethno-nationalism.
The techno-commercialists are everywhere now and largely seem to have won out over the nationalists and the theonomists. Blake Masters is another prominent one from Thiel's network. If you follow these circles at all, it also seems like Thiel has probably also been paying stipends to influencers in the space. It would have been unimaginable in dissident spheres to run cover for Thiel 10 years ago because he is 1) a billionaire with ties to the military-industrial complex, 2) an immigrant, and 3) gay, but there is now quite an extensive network of users on Twitter who promote him. Most of these guys were Trump absolutists; they believed anyone who crossed Trump was assumed to be in the wrong, because Trump was seen as the only viable way forward. It seems like they were in the loop with regards to JD Vance and Elon Musk being brought into Trump's inner circle, because they rapidly became emphatic about both figures despite neither being particularly palatable to their audience (Musk wants to bring in more immigrants, Vance is married to an Indian woman and worked at at investment bank).
Great overview, though. I had the draft for an article like this kicking around but I guess there's no need to finish it now.
I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
Other than that AI doesn’t die. The best thing a king can do is die, because monarchy is terrible.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
My take:
Democrat and republican party are two sides of the same coin!
The parties shift, the faces change, but the game remains the same. Battles are waged in public, deals are made in private. Power is the prize, and blind loyalty is the sacrifice.
Allegiance is demanded, division is fueled. One side painted as righteous, the other as corrupt.
But no more! No more blind devotion. No more politics as theater while lives hang in the balance.
Judge not by party, nor by word but by action and how it affects you.
It’s very much a false dichotomy based on Hollywood superhero slop.
Systematically. There is no symmetry here.