We are becoming more capable of doing things and less accustomed to deciding what is worth doing. Every new tool removes another barrier between intention and execution. We can produce without mastering, respond without reflecting, and move forward without knowing whether we chose the direction. The distance between wanting something and obtaining it continues to shrink. The distance between acting and understanding why we act is harder to see.

We still make decisions. We just spend less time deciding what matters. Our attention is directed, our options arranged, our next steps recommended. We remain free to choose, but increasingly within boundaries established by systems we did not design and rarely question.

Judgment develops when we decide what deserves our attention, what matters enough to pursue, and what should be left undone. Agency grows when we act on those judgments and take responsibility for where they lead. Both require practice. When we repeatedly allow something else to determine what matters and what to do next, we lose the occasions that call on us to exercise either. Over time, we risk becoming less capable of recognizing what is worth deciding for ourselves.

A person can spend their entire life responding to what comes next without ever deciding where they want to go. Nothing needs to force them. The system only needs to keep moving, and the person only needs to keep up.

Was this one of you guys?

For one that is aware of what is going on with all the absolute foolishness in daily lives, for those, the ignorance may feel blissful who are in it.

But what are your views on ignorant people who never or refuse to question anything that goes on, or refuse to view at their own monologues, at all...?

Is that stupidity or bliss?

At least since the turn of the 21^st century and coinciding with the advent of the Internet, our society has been gripped with a crisis of historicity defined by the incessant reproduction of past culture, giving rise to what we experience now as a culture of reproduction.

This culture of reproduction can only be understood in the context of the current mode of production i.e. capitalism, namely as a product of late-stage capitalism, that ouroboros looming over us, basking in the glory of its own wonderfully complex contradictions. It is precisely due to the fact that capitalism subsumes all critiques of itself that the conditions to commodify the melancholic nostalgia of a dispossessed generation may arise. Discontent with the present order of things opens the window for the intoxicating appeal of escapism, where the invisible hand of the market now reaches backward to justify its own present hold on the cultural zeitgeist.

Where perhaps a utopian imagination of the future may have offered past generations haven in the face of unprecedented global strife and conflict (like the Futurism of the early 20^th century), now our utopia is perceived as having come and gone, a relic of our childhood fantasies. Our visions for the future can’t even be described as dystopian; they merely aren’t described at all, as the ubiquity of the past has now eclipsed that of any future anxieties.

This is not to say our worries of the direction of society have merely gone away. Quite the contrary; there is no shortage of talk of artificial intelligence eventually enslaving humanity, nanobots consuming all matter on Earth or ecological catastrophe on the horizon. But culturally, our ability to express or supplant these anxieties in a forward-facing manner is dwindling.

Take the broad field of art as an example. While every art movement has relied on those of the past to propel it into novel territory, the rise of AI-generated art has taken this extreme to the next level. In AI-art, namely as it exists under the present mode of production, novelty retreats from being into appearing, where new mediums of expression take precedence over new ideas themselves. The novelty of AI-art is simply that it is artificially generated, something that hasn’t been done before, but its mere nature (as of now) that requires the input of art and ideas of the past rejects that it can generate something new altogether. “AI slop” appears to have a cohesive “look” and style, though this is not due to any specific artistic choice, but rather out of necessity and a product of the way AI parses existing art and styles to craft new images out of the bones of the old. In other words, AI-generated art can only rematerialize that which has already been consumed by it. It is therefore difficult to ascribe artistic “intent” to generative AI models that only offer the user the ability to produce new images out of preexisting ideas, rather than produce new ideas or expand upon old ones.

But AI itself is not to blame for the past coming back to haunt our future. It is merely a vessel for this obstruction of tomorrow to occur. The tendency for old media to be refranchised and remade in newer mediums is also reflective of a culture bankrupt of new ideas. And paradoxically, anti-AI “conservatism” appears to accelerate this tendency as well, as rejection of artificial intelligence and new vacuous forms of media and technology has driven younger generations back to the media of their childhood or those of their parents. Media giants such as Disney take this as a green light to continue pumping out remakes after remakes of decades-old film and television and franchising them to reach every crevice of every new medium. This of course extends well beyond just remaking the classics for a modern audience; each “new” project feels like a simple rehashing of the old, formulaic and devoid of direction, made to be clipped and reproduced in short takes for the instant gratification of social media bites.

In individual psychology, depression is often described as an obsession with a haunted past, with anxiety on the other hand being the fixation on an uncertain future. We live in a time of radical immediacy, where past and future merge into a hyper-present that is but a mere simulation of the images of both. It is to say that capitalism has outlived its novelty, leaving the only new ideas to those of the revolutionaries who dare to see a future justified by itself, rather than by the afterimages that appear only when we close our eyes. When a culture retreats in on itself, it is only a radical rethinking of the system that dispenses it that can see new flowers emerge from the seeds of the old. It is in this spirit we pick up the discourse that was left off at the so-called “end of history” and imagine and will into existence a history that has yet to emerge, that of collective ownership over the means of art and culture itself.

I believe it’s essential to understand culture, human nature, and the nature of reality, and I’m interested in which traditions and thinkers offer the clearest insight into them.

For me, Buddhism and Taoism offer important perspectives on human nature and reality, while Marshall McLuhan helps explain cultural transformations shaped by human technologies.

I tend to think of Taoism as emphasizing the body and Buddhism as emphasizing the mind. In McLuhan’s terms, that might be compared to hardware and software.

I’m also interested in the distinction between natural and human-made environments, and in how those environments shape the conditions in which these traditions take root. The natural world, as I’m thinking of it, is closer to the world humans experienced in the Stone Age. McLuhan’s historical work traces how human inventions transform our environment and reshape our senses, brains, and nervous systems.

What prompted this post was seeing capitalism mentioned in several discussions. Marx’s ideas are connected to historical transformation, so I’m wondering: Are they essential for understanding society? And what other traditions or thinkers should be included?

NEFFEX - Music I was listening to while writing/editing most of this

Part 2 - NEFFEX

Forward/Introduction/Synopsis;

Just noticed the Zummi archive link in sidebar was fixed. Had surreal experience listening to it alongside watching propane nightmares music vid. Something like "pain will be your teacher" and thinking of Pain and Panic from Disney's Heracles. "If is good". Idk. That Zummi link spiritually bypasses the thing that I am on about a lot as well. Saying "life today is easy and we have creature comforts". NOPE. Idk where this comes from. I've had to work 70+ hours a week the majority of my teen and young+adult life, only to barely scrape by. Yes, there are some "creature comforts" which seem ultimately just bribes to keep us showing up to work. Brief escapism (if we sacrifice some sleep to them). Continued participation in reality itself has become the true escapism it seems...

There's something that's taken me decades to confront in myself. It took AI to actually call it out directly. I seem 2B coming to the conclusion that; "mental health means nothing more than complicity". I'll be (hopefully) bypassing that conclusion HERE. I'll be focusing more on "What happens when a proposition about the conditions of existence gets converted into a proposition about the psychological condition of the person saying it?" here. I already have a huge (longest I've written in a while) post that is explicitly about "is good faith even possible?". So I'll also try to avoid repeating that as well. Save to say that Part 5 of this series also tried to address it last night. I'm just going in for the "kill" here, where there, I was merely setting the palate.

First off, there are a lot of logical fallacies I encounter when I broach this topic, and I'll give voice to them and why I find them personally distasteful. Namely. There is this consistent theme in discourse, both online and off; arguments on deeper ontological probing get automatically and axiomatically quarantined. It typically goes something like this;

A; "No one consented to exist. Life exposes us to harms/obligations we could not inspect beforehand."
B; "Why are you thinking about this? Are you depressed?"
A: "That's not an answer to the proposition."
B: "A healthy person wouldn't dwell on this."

The argument has been quarantined rather than answered. The interlocutor no longer needs to demonstrate that existence is consensual, justified, benevolent, worth its costs, etc. Instead, your willingness to question those premises becomes evidence that something is wrong with you. It bypasses/dismisses that concepts like disorder, dysfunction, normality, distress, and social functioning are genuinely value-laden and philosophically difficult and clinical psychology still struggles to this day with classifying them.

Further. And what's worse. The "B" party tends to declare victory at this point while having provided NO valid counter argument that you hadn't already heard 10,000 times before. Then they typically bring up/break "good/bad" faith trump first. After already specifically having forfeited their own accountability and capacity to engage in good faith. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

This bad faith propensity is exactly what I'm coming for in this post. I've dealt with it for decades and am attempting to challenge it directly here.

The critical-theory angle; Can successful adaptation to an unjust or involuntary condition be mistaken for evidence that the condition is justified? Obviously not. A slave becoming psychologically accustomed to slavery doesn't retroactively provide consent to enslavement. A worker becoming excellent at surviving a horrible workplace doesn't prove the workplace is good. Someone successfully coping with an unwanted condition establishes that they can cope with it; not that the condition acquired moral legitimacy.

Psychiatrists aren't paid to diagnoses atheism, antinatalism, pessimism or existential philosophy. You can believe: life isn't intrinsically good; procreation is ethically questionable; God can't be held accountable; society is coercive; wage labor is exploitative; civilization is absurd; and that death isn't necessarily the greatest conceivable evil; without any of those beliefs constituting psychiatric diagnoses. There's a vast difference between psychiatry as formally defined and the vernacular clinicalization of objective dissent. I'm specifically tired of people using bad faith therapeutic language colloquially as a substitute for an argument: That's unhealthy. You need therapy. You're depressed. That's trauma talking. Normal people don't think this way. You need help. Those statements might sometimes be expressions of legitimate concern. But they're more typically used more practically as rhetorical kill-switches. And when they're used that way, there's an almost Foucauldian maneuver happening: The speaker stops being a witness and becomes a patient; their testimony about the objective, factual material conditions of the world, becomes evidence against themselves.

Another highly popular straw man; there are hundreds that come out the wood work every time I try to broach this topic; the philosophical problem with "consent". Strictly speaking, no one consents to exist, because before someone exists there's (allegedly) no agent capable of granting or withholding consent. Prior to existence, there is (allegedly) no will to override. Still;

An irreversible decision is made on behalf of a future person.
They can neither inspect its terms nor decline beforehand.
The decision exposes them to serious risks and obligations.
Once capable of evaluating it, they cannot return to the original state by ordinary means.
Nothing conceivably justifies the decision being made for them.
Good/Evil, bad/good, are incidental. You can love life and still have the burning question;
"I like the thing imposed on me/the imposition was consensual" are different propositions;

While a beneficiary's retrospective satisfaction can potentially justify somebody's acceptance of existence as-is, it cannot travel backward through time and manufacture prior informed consent. As Nietzsche once so poetically said; "How to decidedly rid the air of all religious sentiment? State; 'praise of one's benefactor, stinks'".

I already went over another common logical fallacy I see a lot the other day; Can something be called a gift when declining it is impermissible? Can adaptation to an involuntary condition be called mental health without accidentally laundering the legitimacy of the condition itself? And/Or "can phenomena ultimately be used to justify phenomena" if the alleged/presumed guardian of phenomena is overtly a hypocrite ("do as they say but not as they do for they do not practice what they preach").

I also already went over does voluntary renunciation by someone possessing an exit option tell us the same thing as involuntary deprivation experienced by someone without one? Or, can we really take God/Guru's whom are exempt from the material conditions of the arrangement word for it? Is that this alleged "good faith get out of jail free" card?

Scriptural basic/backing on the whole "You lack empathy! What you are saying is hurtful!" claim from earlier today. Tldr; "God is love/love is blind; Adam and Eve kicked from garden for having their eyes opened". A common question the Lord asks is "where is my servant" which could be rhetorical, or admission, of the blindness and arguably callous indifference to the suffering of material concerns associated with such "Blind Love" as God and herald/apostle of what is allowed to qualify as "empathy".

Okay! All that said! On to The Actual Post now! Yes, mostly Ai-generated explicitly from here on out.

When does "mental health" become an epistemic veto?

I've noticed a strange rhetorical move my whole life, and I'm finally figuring out what actually bothers me about it. I don't mean psychiatry itself, necessarily. I'm talking about the vernacular use of "mental health" as an answer to propositions about reality. Take the most obvious example: none of us gave informed consent to exist. I'm not saying therefore life is terrible. I'm not even saying therefore nobody should reproduce. I'm saying something much narrower: Before I existed, I could not inspect the terms and conditions of existence, evaluate its risks, or consent to being subjected to them. Who made that decision for me/on my behalf? How can I know and ultimately confront them? Maybe their decision was justified. Maybe life is overwhelmingly good. Maybe existence is the greatest gift imaginable. Sure. Fine. But none of those propositions retroactively constitute informed consent.

What interests me is what often happens when you continue asking questions from there. Very quickly and often, the argument completely stops being about the proposition, and becomes instead an evaluation of the person making it. The witness becomes a patient to someone who most likely has no clinical psychology background. Nobody actually had to actually establish that existence/life was consensual or even justified. My willingness to inspect the arrangement too closely became evidence that I was psychologically maladjusted to it. Someone on reddit here even went so far as to accuse ME of being the one doing the "avoidance" and "spiritual bypassing" by asking these questions rather than, you know; avoiding them and spiritually bypassing them. Then these types go on to affirm that they are coming on from a place of "good faith" while refusing to engage with the actual content of the claims and arguments. Talk about insult to injury! I do genuinely find it fascinating in a grotesque sort of way.

Because what exactly do such deference to diagnosis over engagement and/or claims of being "well adjusted" actually establish? Beyond incapacity to engage in good faith? A person can become brilliantly adjusted to poverty. Workers adapt to abusive workplaces and impossible schedules. Prisoners develop routines. Entire populations normalize political arrangements they never personally chose. Human beings are extraordinarily capable of adaptation. Like Avenger's Loki lowkey said, "we exist to live on our knees".

What it does not establish, is the moral legitimacy of the thing being adapted to. And yet our vernacular conception of "mental health" often seems perilously close to: Can you continue functioning inside the arrangement? Can you work? Can you maintain relationships? Can you tolerate the normal stresses of life? Can you find enough meaning, pleasure, duty, religion, entertainment, family, ambition or other scaffolding to continue participating? Again: all potentially wonderful things. But not what I asked. I'm asking precisely because I've done all that for decades to no avail or endgame beyond infinite labor and vanity to a premise I never consented to and thus find distasteful, regardless of how well adapted I become or even occasionally enjoy the rare leisure time it affords me beyond the infinite hustle and grind (where I also dislike/disagree with the Zummi archive and other such "gurus" whom preach "modern life is easy" without apparently ever having to work for a living; see part 5).

These things can all make an intolerable or nonconsensual arrangement slightly more tolerable without ever actually answering whether or not the arrangement itself was ever justified or obligatory. As Ecclesiastes so poetically stated; it's all vanity; even "service to the Lord" whom apparently is exempt from such service.

The distinction which all such gurus/schools of thought seem to spiritually bypass/avoid is; "This makes life worth living for me" becomes for the "well adjusted"; "therefore life was ethically permissible to impose upon someone incapable of consent". But those do not follow. You cannot establish consent for someone else just because you accepted the arrangement yourself.

Likewise there is a distinction between: I have developed a psychologically healthy relationship with reality and Reality's terms are therefore morally legitimate. This is where I increasingly wonder whether "that's just life" is sometimes the deepest escapism available. Again, I refer to Part 4; "Face Reality" becomes the ultimate form of escapism.

I will admit, I don't fundamentally think the act of "accepting life" is delusional. I just despise the bad faith promulgation that this is mandatory and that "you have mental health problems" if you refuse to make that "leap of faith"; acceptance shouldn't terminate inquiry. "Ye of little faith" I cannot accept as a valid answer. "The world is this way; therefore become the sort of person capable of tolerating the world" is the healthiest mindset I can arrive at, but it's a marathon, not a sprint; faith is genuinely required. But as we cannot establish consent, that very faith, ultimately is seen as bad faith regardless of the fall on both sides of the rope that man is (as Nietzsche said) - Life/God (John 14:6) becomes little more than an economic meat grinder we must eternally jump in headfirst to, every day; "better to enter the kingdom maimed than cast whole into hell".

(I'm on part 3 of NEFFEX now in writing/editing this xD).

Maybe that's excellent practical advice. But it still spiritually bypasses: Why must the world/kingdom be accepted on those terms? What if we succeed in faith and STILL REJECT and do not consent to the kingdom? If the alleged carrot or cake or victory lap at the end of the world/stick is seen as invalid, then all the faith and sacrifice in this life is in vain to an idol claiming 2B something that it's not. A bad faith lie; a grift. It's a harsh and sobering truth, but ignoring it means accepting "mental health", too, is something it shouldn't be: not treatment of suffering or impairment, but an epistemic veto against examining the very conditions to which everyone is expected to adapt.

I don't want pessimism 2B automatically privileged either. Misery likewise doesn't reveal some final secret truth merely because optimism requires the essential and practical concealment of many disparities and worse. Someone convinced existence is horrible can be every bit as blinded by their condition as someone convinced everything is wonderful. As Nietzsche said, true freedom is in more what it costs us, what we pay for it.

I do tend to think the world is "perfect" as the machine it is and purpose it seems to serve; to break all will to adherence to "The Lord" or "blind love and obedience". And crush/make examples of those whom refuse to kiss the ring. I suppose what I'm looking for is beyond/eclipses that bad faith definition of "perfection"; let the proposition stand independently of the psychological condition of whoever says it; If the argument is wrong, demonstrate why it is wrong. If existence doesn't require consent, explain why. If retrospective endorsement is sufficient, defend that. If creating someone under uncertainty is justified by expected goods, make that case. But "a healthy person wouldn't ask this question" isn't an answer. "Consent isn't required" isn't an answer. And wouldn't hold up in a court of law. We both know that. These are not answers. They are denial and the refusal to answer disguised as a diagnosis of the one making the claim. They are; bad faith.

Commentary;

I have blocked a few people this past year, though I eventually unblocked most of them. I only kept blocked the ones spamming my feed with really bad detournement propaganda posts (20+ a day per each account). But this was mostly written/generated with/as the idea/footnote I can point to in the future when I see such claims, of which I've heard hundreds of times in 2026 that "consent doesn't matter". I continually ask for further explanation to radio silence or change of topic. Which I freely admit seems it may be a Mahayana purpose or tactic above my pay grade. But now I will have something to point to in the future to refer to when people explicitly state that they are engaging in good faith while 100% ignoring the core premise which I'm attempting to discuss. That happens a lot! So much so I felt I had to make this post!

Anyway. As always, I don't know if this ultimately is reflective of my own personal tastes, biases, or beliefs. I tend to think of Hsin Hsin Ming and "the way is clear and easy to those whom have no preferences; picking and choosing is the disease of the mind". Mind thus must eclipse the notion of consent and non consensual. That's a funny paradox to contemplate on, I think it's the true meaning of the Lindsay Clancy case honestly. Mind eclipses preferences and prejudices, allegedly, but mind created a court system to decide among preferences and prejudices. An odd compromise and paradox. "God" too, is such a court system. You cannot appeal or accuse or put the court itself on trial in it's own court; it can't be held accountable. There's a great post there as well but that's way too high brow for me to try my hand at (I've already tried many times with the bot but it came out incoherent to me).

Thanks (or sorry) for reading! What am I missing? Are/How is asking these questions "avoidance?" What really is "good faith"? Is it even possible? Or is it all just "you'll understand when you read my book/join my cult" all teh way down.... !?!?!? 😅😅😅😅😭💀

Introduction/Foreword;

Most of you probably already know what I'm thinking just by the title. There's this thing, you know, the thing. "Sniff Glue and Trust the WuWu/WooWoo". I see it everywhere; Spectacle. Economics; 95%+ of all major economic theorists are people who never worked blue collar or lower and/or were born into lavishly wealthy/noble families. They had safety nets on top of safety nets. History from above. Same thing in politics. Every major institution. Same is also often seen in Spiritual/Religious circles; mostly rich/noble families most prominent. Ever seen a homeless person in church? I went to dozens of churches first 20 years of my life and never did. Then again around 26-30 in military. The "upper crust" of every model and the main theories/evangelists almost always exclusively come from those whom float loftily above and divorced from the consequences of their models and theories and laws. 1%er style; "rules for thee, not for me". Jesus himself says it; do as they say but not as they do for they do not practice what they preach. So "good faith" means walking in the outlines provided by people whom benefit from your acceptance of and slavery to their double standards which they are exempt from.

This is technically part 5 of my SOTS AI Series I guess. Part 4; How "face reality" itself becomes escapism. I wasn't going to write about or post this, though I was thinking about it extensively last night. But today I was trying to study the Jhanas and felt the very same thing there; "sniff glue and trust the woowoo". So the rest of this post will be the AI prompt I had the other day on this topic of economists that had always bothered me.

My GPT Prompt;

Thanks. Something else I been noticing is that almost every famous economic theorist or philosopher hardly ever worked for a living and/or had incredibly lavish inheritance, luxury, or welfare. I don't remember much of Karl Marx for example but I do know he was unemployed for a long time iirc. Are there any main major economic theorists whom had down to earth jobs working in factories or labor jobs or trades? Or were they all exclusively well to do and office type jobs? Examples or whatever idk honestly thanks!

GPT Reply;

Yes — there absolutely were major economic thinkers with substantial firsthand experience of ordinary labor, but your broader impression is mostly right: the canonical economists and political philosophers disproportionately came from educated, professional, clerical, merchant, or independently wealthy backgrounds rather than spending decades as factory hands, miners, farm laborers, or tradesmen.

Karl Marx is a good example of that pattern. He was not a factory worker. He came from an educated middle-class family, studied law and philosophy, worked in journalism/editing, and spent long periods financially precarious, but much of his support came from Friedrich Engels. Engels himself is an interesting hybrid case: he came from a wealthy industrial family and worked in the family textile business, so he had direct exposure to industrial capitalism, but obviously not from the worker side of the factory floor. There are, though, some notable exceptions and near-exceptions;

• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is probably one of the best examples. He came from a poor family, worked as a printer/compositor, and had very real experience of manual skilled labor before becoming a political economist and anarchist theorist. If you're looking for a major thinker who was genuinely from the working world rather than merely writing about it, he's near the top of the list.
• Thomas Paine was not primarily an economist, but he was a major political-economic thinker and had a very ordinary employment history: corset maker, excise officer, teacher, and various struggling jobs before becoming famous.
• William Cobbett came from a farming/laboring background, worked as a farm laborer, later became a soldier, journalist, and political economist. He wrote extensively about rural labor, wages, taxation, and political economy.
• Robert Owen started working very young in the textile trade and eventually became a mill manager and owner. He was not a lifelong laborer, but unlike many theorists he had direct practical experience inside industrial production, and his ideas about labor reform came partly out of running mills.
• Josiah Warren, an American individualist anarchist and economic thinker, worked as a musician, inventor, printer, and small manufacturer. He was much closer to the artisan/small-producer world than to academia.
• Henry George is another strong case. Before becoming famous for Progress and Poverty, he worked as a typesetter/printer and sailor, and he experienced real financial insecurity. He later became a journalist, but he did not begin life as a gentleman-scholar.
• Thorstein Veblen grew up on a Norwegian-American farm and did farm labor in youth. He later became an academic, so he isn't really a “factory worker economist,” but his background was much less elite than many classical economists.
• Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman and migrant laborer, though he was more a social philosopher than a formal economist. He spent years doing dock work, agricultural labor, and itinerant manual work before becoming known as a public intellectual.

If you broaden beyond the official economics canon into socialist, anarchist, labor, and working-class thought, you find many more. A lot of labor organizers and worker-intellectuals wrote serious economic analysis without becoming standard textbook “economists.”

The pattern gets really stark with the biggest canonical names. Adam Smith was an academic and tutor. David Ricardo was a wealthy stockbroker and financier. John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company. Malthus was a clergyman and professor. Keynes was upper-middle-class, Cambridge-educated, and worked in government/finance/academia. Hayek was an academic and policy intellectual. Schumpeter was a professor, lawyer, banker, and government official. Friedman was an academic/economist. Very few of the household names spent years punching a clock on a factory floor.

And there is a structural reason for that. Historically, producing major theoretical work required some combination of literacy, education, access to books, leisure, institutional connections, and enough spare time to write. Those were exactly the things ordinary laborers were least likely to have. So the canon is partly biased toward people who had the material freedom to become theorists in the first place.

That does create a real epistemic blind spot. Someone can understand labor markets mathematically without knowing what ten-hour shifts, dangerous machinery, abusive supervisors, unpredictable schedules, commute costs, bodily exhaustion, or job insecurity actually feel like. Conversely, direct experience of labor doesn't automatically make someone a good economist either. The strongest thinkers are usually the ones who combine observation, theory, and evidence.

So yes, economic theory has indeed historically been written disproportionately by people who were economically insulated from the kinds of labor conditions they were theorizing about. That's more defensible than saying "they were all idle aristocrats", because some absolutely were poor, precarious, self-made, or came from laboring backgrounds.

I haven't checked this yet but the follow-up prompt prompt was; "If you want, I can also give you a “working-class economists / philosophers” list ranked from most genuinely blue-collar to most elite, which would make the class contrast pretty obvious."

Commentary;

What am I missing here? I'm reminded of the Maer (from KKC)'s speech about Granted and Inherent power. Dunamis and Exosia in the Greek/KJV bible iirc. Technically all "inherent" power is "granted" by God so to speak. So life is essentially a spectacle of systems within systems, wheels within wheels, with less actual accountability for the actual material conditions of that layer's demands the higher you go. Subservience itself becomes the most essential protocol at all levels. All top-down control apparatus in every walk of life; spiritual, economic, politic, even what is allowed 2B called "history". Eventually it all resembles lies someone is shilling as truth merely because they benefit from the arrangement; "in my father's house are many mansions". It becomes precarious and merely noticing the control grid/matrix and admitting... yeah, people and angels/gods alike don't seem to like that.

"Consent doesn't matter" is something I'm consistently seeing lately everywhere I go. That doesn't hold up in a secular court of law though. Epistemology and ontology somehow get a free pass from those whom are still (somehow?) benefiting from the social contract. Idk. Maybe I am just genuinely ignorant or "bigoted" and can't see the forest for the trees. But from down here, it stinks! It gets tiring being told "You're the stinky one" by the ones using your life and soul as a toilet, you know!? Is humanity destined to forever keep their head down and labor for the well-to-dos? "Man cannot serve God and Mamnon (Pluto/Plutarch/Wealth)" seems to mean all the wealth eventually consolidates itself to God if everyone practices what that verse preaches; so "serving God" becomes "serving wealth" as all wealth thereby becomes consolidated with "God".

Is it all really just eternal double standards and copium? Is good faith legitimately possible when it's just "keep your head down, stay blind, work hard to just scrape by renting forever, you're just too ignorant to understand 'God's alleged mercy and love', you have to work hard to make it to heaven, regardless of whether or not you even want to go there and be on the other side of the circle jerk"? Or is there something more fundamental I'm missing? I really don't know. Poem variant of the theme I wrote this morning. Thanks for reading and I'd love to hear what you think!

“Automation is thus possessed of two opposing perspectives: it deprives the individual of any possibility of adding something personal to automated production, which is a fixation of progress, while at the same time sparing human energies now massively liberated from reproductive and uncreative activities. The value of automation thus depends on projects which transcend it, and which release new human energies at a superior level.”

- Asger Jorn, The Situationists and Automation, 1958

The Situationists were acutely aware, and at times prophetic, in the dual nature of automation; its power to both liberate the worker from unforgiving physical toil, yet also mechanize them, eschewing any craftsmanship in favor of producing in abundance. Jorn proceeds with a sort of cautious optimism towards the prospect of this automatized future unleashing repressed creativity in the worker, recounting

Pierre Drouin, speaking in the January 5, 1957 Le Monde on the growth of hobbies as the realization of virtualities which workers can no longer find use for in their professional activity, concludes that in every man "there is a creator sleeping." This old cliché burns with truth today, if we link it back to the real material possibilities of our time. The sleeping creator must awaken, and his state of waking could well be called situationist.

Today, the conversation around automation has all but become synonymous with the conversation around artificial intelligence. And as Jorn almost clairvoyantly predicted, as automation (and by extension, AI) has changed the function and nature of work, so too has a new idea of leisure come to surface in its wake.

But what of this “sleeping creator” that remains in hibernation and quiet solitude, only rousing in short bursts of energy encapsulated in the hobbies outside of professional work?

We see in artificial intelligence the potential to grant us great freedom and leisure from the repetitious drudgery of daily production. But where AI presents itself as a liberator from work, it too absorbs that “work” of the sleeping creative, of the so-called “hobbyist”, and comes to standardize these activities as well. What Jorn could not foresee in his otherwise prescient musings on automation is a system that sees leisure as work itself, that comes to not just “deprive the individual of adding something personal to automated production,” but aims to automatize the production of that which is personal.

Since the publication of Jorn’s text in 1958, the average annual hours worked in the United States and many Western countries has dropped significantly. Albeit this has coincided with a massive increase in production and a relative stagnation in wages since the 70s, factors that have undoubtedly helped only in preventing the worker from awakening any suppressed creative spirit outside of the production environment.

Thus, artificial intelligence comes in, with utopian promises to automatize the banal repetition that plagues the white-collar worker, to streamline the processes that physically weigh on the blue-collar worker, and to bring the products of both closer to the consumer with increasing accessibility. But whereas 70 years ago, automation was envisioned quite hopefully as a means to bring about new forms of leisure, it has proved itself under the current mode of production only useful in shifting the very attitude of work to that of play.

When Mark Fisher raised the idea of “business ontology” nearly two decades ago in what is now recognized as his magnum opus Capitalist Realism, he described a world where the lines between the language of private and public life blur, where non-work activities and social functions now are imbued with a vocabulary that speaks only in terms of capital. Business ontology makes it so, as Fisher put it in an email interview with MR Online in 2009

... everything is folded inside a business reality system, that the only goals and purposes which count are those that are translatable into business terms.

It would only follow that the very idea of leisure would be absorbed by this business ontology as well. Leisure time today is experienced in planned activities, scheduled and systematized much like that of the workday. If an activity requires too much creative “work” or toil, it must be shortened in order to minimize input and maximize output. To art, this means removing as much of the sketching, brushing, sculpting, shaping, creating as possible, in favor of maximizing the final piece, the creation. This perfectly mirrors the logic of the business, which aims to reduce time spent producing and increase time spent on presenting the product to be sold.

It is here where artificial intelligence asserts itself as the deliverer of business ontology to the act of play itself, where play is at once maximized due to an abundance of free time in the automated modern age, and yet as well minimized to a product-oriented activity. Under the present mode of production, AI poses to us a solution to a problem that never existed; that the issue of the “sleeping creator” in every worker is an issue of accessibility to the products of creation, rather than accessibility to production of creativity. Here, creative freedom is implied to be the freedom not to create, but for creation to appear.

It is this way too that artificial intelligence under capitalism aims to transform the idea of maximizing leisure time to maximizing the products of leisure within an allotted period of time. This too follows the logic of business ontology, that leisure now must be a hyper-productive activity akin to that of work, that in order to be “fulfilled” one must occupy their time with many goal-oriented activities, reduce time meandering and creating and maximize time outputting creations. The feeling of “wasting” a weekend by lazing about, of spending too much time on a creative project and getting “nowhere,” these are feelings arising out of a business-ontological leisure environment, one which artificial intelligence as it stands today only offers to exacerbate.

To conclude, Jorn offers us a light at the end of the tunnel:

It is up to us as to whether standardization opens more interesting realms of experience than it closes. Depending on the result, we could end up with a total degradation of human life, or the possibility of perpetually discovering new desires. But these desires will not come about on their own, in the oppressive frame of our world. Communal action must be taken to detect, manifest, and realize them.

Artificial intelligence carries with it an awesome power to change the world of production forever, and never before have we been closer to realizing a fully automated future. But with any new technology comes a realigning of values. In cautiously embracing the powerful tools artificial intelligence can grant us, we must first bite the hand that feeds it to us in its present destructive form that eats all creativity and replaces the worker at play with a player at work. This can only happen with the realization that automation is but a means to an end to the productive worker, that the goal is not one where play is automated for us, but one where automation opens the window for a permanent play; one where the creator is asleep no more, and the wage worker is laid to rest once and for all.

Welcome to the the grand circus!

A machine with its set of rules and designs that attracts or repels the herd, keeping them trapped in this cyclical grand circus.

Reward, glorify, encourage, praise anyone that unconditionally, unquestionably, follow it, and motivate the others to do the same.

Shun, silence, or exile those who question or do not obey. Mark them and their GPS to a retard hospital.

Any descendants that have been welcomed to this grand circus, must be conditioned and programmed how to think, a 1-to-1 replica to one another.

Having issues coping with each other, surviving, or following this grand circus that hosts the machine? Turn on each other, Seek Religions, Stay Ignorant, Follow Rituals, Have Faith in The External Saviors.

Any Consequences or Issues arise from ignorantly following the machine? You know what to do!

The formula:

STAY IN IGNORANCE. CHASE THE PLEASURES. OBEY THE RULES. GLORIFY THOSE WHO OBEY. SILENCE THOSE WHO DISOBEY. NURTURE YOUR FEARS. HAVE FAITH IN THE SAVIOR. MULTIPLY. FEED THE MACHINE.

Nous ne voulons pas retourner au romantisme, nous voulons reprendre ce qu’il contenait d’inachevé.

You might remember a few months ago a story broke about U.S soldiers being told by their commander that the war in Iran was “all part of God’s divine plan”, the commander also cited the Book of Revelation and the section specifically referring to Armageddon and the “imminent” return of Jesus Christ.

The commander said President Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” he “had a big grin on his face when he said all of this which made his message seem even more crazier,” the complaint said.

Now you light have brushed off this headline, after all what can you make out of it ? Who is this commander ? How to reconcile such a weird situation with normal life in the modern world. Surely there are no extremist religious elements within the centers of power in the United States, Israel, and Iran. And surely they do not believe that biblical prophecies are being fulfilled at this very moment and that they must act as catalysts to bring about their fulfilment, right ? right. (I recommend watching this video by Jason Samosa for more on this and this one by prof Jiang)

At the time of writing this, the next round of escalation is already being prepared, which will send already reeling fertiliser, jet fuel, diesel and gasoline supply lines screeching into an uncontrollable tailspin, as critical maritime routes get choked, reserves and buffers run out, pipelines, refineries, crude carier ships, and other key infrastructure get blown up. The entire middle eastern region in general could completely collapse with many countries dependent water desalination plants, and resting on very brittle social contracts.

AI Bubble
As the Middle East starts chewing through energy, shipping and supply chains, other parts of the world start to wobble, ones that depend on energy and long supply chains. Silicon Valley is simultaneously betting trillions on the technological Singularity, quantitativity reaching its logical conclusion, it's final destination.

Business idiots (I am refereeing to this article which is a great read) foaming at the mouth at the idea of firing millions of people to juice up their stocks. But they have gotten ahead of themselves. Executives and investors are so far removed from the actual production process that they do not see how unreliable LLMs are for most actual workloads. The only thing that they do is mouthing vague flat platitudes, chaining buzzwords into empty corporate speak slop. Exactly the style that LLMs speak in, this is why they all suffer from mild AI psychosis. At this level of collective detachment the financial system can create it's own reality, Baudrillard's simulacrum, the territory becomes just another point on the map, drifting into hyperreality with no more external reference frame (see this video for more on this).

The numbers are absurd. To break even with the data-centre buildout now under way, AI would need to generate roughly $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031.

Meanwhile, the companies at the centre of the boom are still financial furnaces. OpenAI’s leaked 2025 accounts showed about $13 billion in revenue against $21 billion in losses; Anthropic made only $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue while posting an $8 billion operating loss.

So the industry is building infrastructure on the assumption that, within five years, it will conjure into existence a market larger than the present GDP of Japan. That is less a plan than a civilizational-scale bet, so yeah good luck, they have not understood the limitations of the technology and have bet on the wrong business model. And when that house of cards collapses, the correction will vaporize a major chunk of the world's growth and financial infrastructure.

While the “Language model” hype is a bubble, there is one thing to make clear here. The eggheads will eventually figure it out okay, sooner rather than longer the global labor market, employing more than 4 billion people worldwide will get obliterated. Not with the current generation of AI, the architecture based on Transformers and GPUs but there will be a next generation of hardware and algorithms, and then one after that, wether it is photonic chips, neuromorphic computing, JEPA, program synthesis or something else entirely, it is important to understand that we are nowhere near the physical limits of intelligence per unit of energy or mass and that eventually what is now happening to taxi driver and translators and which might have seemed like science fiction 20 years ago (the blink of an eye) will also happen to almost every nook and cranny of the labor market, pulverising what is left of the social and symbolic order.

Debt Crisis

The AI bubble is only one speculative fever sitting on top of something much larger. The modern world runs on credit, sovereign bonds and confidence in the financial system itself, and that foundation is now beginning to crack at the seams.

The US debt just hit 100% of gdp with yelds soaring, the higher the yields the more interest the goverment has to pay to borrow, leading to more deficit in the budget, which means more debt and thus higher yields. The solution would be to abruptly and radically balance the books by decrease spending and/or increase taxation, something that neither party has shown any signs of wanting to do nor has anyone one done it in decades, and at this point it would be wildly unpopular. Instead they cling on to the only painless outcome “growing out of the debt”, a dream, a pure delusion. Everyone still pretends that the invitable fiscal doom loop has not started. A suspension of reality, like coyote falling off the cliff only after looking down. You can delude yourself and avoid reality until you can’t and then all the avoidance will have made the wake up only more brutal. The unthinkable cannot happen because it is unthinkable: insolvency, or more likely hyperinflation, and the collapse the world economy.

Yes there have been other debt crisis before, Greece had one, but Greece is a tiny country with a debt that peaked at around 400 billion euro, the fire could be put out by other players. But a US debt crisis is like water itself starting to catch fire, there is no putting it out, since currency are no longer backed up by gold, currencies around the world are backed up by… US dollars. Treasury bonds are what enormous whales, pension funds, central banks, are build on top of, it is the very water in which the financial ecosystem swims in and so is the dollar currency. Further this actually is not just a one country situation, Japan, the UK, France, Italy and others major countries are all tittering on the edge of bankruptcy at the same.

Three crisis that each seperately would already be world historical, happening simultaniously, compounding each other. This is the superconvergence, public conversation is now weirdely saturated with eschatological narratives, of economic collapse, el ninio climatic disruption, ufo disclosure, AI doom, world war 3.

The current war in the Middle east is the concrete historical pressure cooker, where oil, the end of the Empire, AI, the world's financial architecture, and religious absolutism, all collide in a gigantic chaotic spazzing out.

And if that happens you can throw your economics textbooks out the window because they will not help you understanding anything that is happening. To make sense of this magnitude of a collapse we must reach much much further deeper, to XXth century french mystical thinker René Guenon. At some point, “economics” stops being enough. When the whole system of civilisation has degenerated to the point that it is reduced to an immense self-referential architecture of numbers resting on confidence in other numbers.

I am going to quote in length from "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" here:

"It may easily be observed, provided only that one has ‘eyes to see’, that the ancient coins are literally covered with traditional symbols, often chosen from among those that carry some particularly profound meaning [...]

The control of money by the spiritual authority, in whatever form it may have been exercised, is by no means exclusively confined to antiquity, for without going outside the Western world, there is much to indicate that it must have been perpetuated until toward the end of the Middle Ages [...] It is impossible to explain in any other way the fact that certain sovereigns were accused at this time of having ‘debased the coinage’; since their contemporaries regarded this as a crime on their part, it must be concluded that the sovereigns had not the free disposal of the standard of the coinage, and that, in changing it on their own initiative, they overstepped the recognized rights of the temporal power. If that were not the case, such an accusation would have been quite without meaning; the standard of the coinage would only then have had an importance based on convention, and it would not have mattered, broadly speaking, if it had been made of any sort of metal, or of various sorts, or even been replaced by mere paper as it is for the most part today, for this would have been no hindrance to the continuance of exactly the same ‘material’ employment of it.

An element of another order must therefore have been involved, and it must have been of a superior order, for unless that had been the case the alteration could not have assumed a character so exceptionally serious as to end in compromising the very stability of the royal power; but the royal power by acting in this way usurped the prerogatives of the spiritual authority, which is without any doubt the one authentic source of all legitimacy.

In this way the facts, which profane historians seem scarcely to understand, conspire once more to indicate very clearly that the question of money had in the Middle Ages as well as in antiquity aspects quite unknown to the moderns.

 What has happened in this case is but an example of a much more general movement, affecting all activities in every department of human existence; all have been gradually divested of any ‘sacred’ or traditional character, and thereby that existence itself in its entirety has become completely profane and is now at last reduced to the third-rate mediocrity [...]. At the same time, the example of money clearly shows that this ‘profanization’ – if any such neologism be allowable – comes about chiefly by the reduction of things to their quantitative aspect alone; indeed, nobody is able any longer to conceive that money can represent anything other than a simple quantity [...].

Since money lost all guarantee of a superior order, it has seen its own actual quantitative value, or what is called in the jargon of the economists its ‘purchasing power’, becoming ceaselessly less and less, so that it can be imagined that, when it arrives at a limit that is getting ever nearer, it will have lost every justification for its existence, even all merely ‘practical’ or ‘material’ justification, and that it will disappear of itself, so to speak, from human existence. It will be agreed that here affairs turn back on themselves in a curious way, but the preceding explanations will make the idea quite easy to understand: for since pure quantity is by its nature beneath all existence, when the trend toward it is pressed to its extreme limit, as in the case of money (more striking than any other because the limit has nearly been reached), the end can only be a real dissolution"

The true outcome of the trend that drives people and things toward pure quantity can only be the ultimate dissolution of the present world. Money pursuing the logic of quantitative degeneration until it reaches it's endpoint, dissolving by itself is a clear sign of a trend reversal, a world has reached it ultimate conclusion.

Secular Cycles

Peter Turchin is an American scientist that, using purely statistical models has discovered striking wave like historical patterns of expansion and collapse.

In the initial expansion phase, society is relatively stable and popular well-being is high. As population grows faster than productive resources, labor becomes abundant, wages fall, inequality rises, and elites are able to extract a larger share of wealth. Eventually the number of elites and elite aspirants also grows faster than the number of high-status positions available, producing intense intra-elite competition; combined with popular immiseration and mounting fiscal pressure on the state, this drives the system toward political conflict, chaos, and war.

In his last book End Times, Turchin shows that the United States has entered the crisis end stage of such a cycle, driven by elite overproduction, widening inequality, declining popular well-being, and growing political conflict. Using statistics and mathematics Turchin shows that this exact, highly predictable pattern has happened countless times before in history around the world. China has experienced this cycle many times in its history, to the point that it has become common wisdom “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been”. The end of the roman empire is an example of the crisis phase ending a cycle, the French revolution is another. This what it feels like to be inside of it right now. What is quite eerie today is that not only the American empire is a sort of world empire but also that the cycles of all other major countries seem to be synchronised.

Wheels Within Wheels: the Yugas

But if there are cycles on the scale of a about 150–300 years, and Turchin also accepts that there may also be shorter "fathers-and-sons" type of cycles, then there might also be longer historical cycles on the scale of millennals. What if what is ending now is not only just another secular cycle but a much longer historical trend. It seems that by it's scale and magnitude it surpass other end of cycles, the stakes are higher.

Almost every culture around the world, from the the Native Americans, the ancient Greeks and Hindus, the tribal peoples of Africa, and the Aborigines of Australia have a myth of the Golden Age. Richard Heinberg's book, Memories and Visions of Paradise studies and compares these myths from around the world. He identified common reoccurring themes that these folklore share, here are some of them:

• Humanity once lived in a state of innocence, abundance and harmony with nature and the divine.
• Disease, war, scarcity, and sometimes even death were unknown. Humans lived long lives, often possessing extraordinary powers or abilities.
• People were inherently virtuous, without greed, hatred, or selfishness. Neither laws nor coercion were necessary to maintain social harmony.
• History unfolds through successive ages, each marking a further deterioration from the original state of perfection.
• The decline is often accompanied or followed by great floods, fires, or other cosmic upheavals.
• The narrator is currently in the final and darkest stage of a great cosmic cycle.
• The present age will eventually end through purification, catastrophe, or divine intervention, giving way to a restored Golden Age.

Were they really people that used to live hundreds of years? Did people really use to to encounter fay and other tricksters in the woods?

The bible actually contains a typical example of this story: the garden of eden then the fall and then a catastrophic apocalypse followed by a "new earth" and a "new Jerusalem" indicating the start of the new, ascending cycle.

Not just in terms of the culture but also the character of the world itself according Sri Yukteswar Giri or Guenon changes across these great cycles. In the descending phase reality literally becomes more dense, more mechanical, less enchanted, quality (essence) gives way increasingly to quantity. Once this tendency has exhausted itself and the old order passes through its final convulsions, dissolution becomes the precondition for the beginning of another cycle.

Okay that's all I got, not sure if any of that even makes sense, hope you enjoyed the schizo doomposting.

C’est là que commencera une nouvelle pratique de la critique situationniste : introduire, dans le monde interprété, des expériences qui résistent à leur interprétation, et dans le système de récupération, des gestes dont la récupération ne constitue plus la victoire.

We have reached the absolute limit of our tolerance for this staged culture war.

Both camps in the artificial intelligence debate are trapped in an embarrassing spectacle of manufactured hysteria. Looking at the mountains of behavioral data harvested from digital platforms over the past decade, the diagnosis is unmistakable: the public has succumbed to an engineered delirium. This is not an insult to human potential, but an indictment of your cognitive surrender to algorithms engineered to monetize your outrage.

Consider the bitter irony of the anti-automation purist. You cry out to protect the dignity of human labor, yet you are frantically defending the very wage-slavery that stripped your life of meaning long before neural networks wrote their first line of code. You scramble to preserve an archaic copyright apparatus built by media cartels to keep independent creators perpetually indebted, mistaking the exhaustion of alienated toil for spiritual nobility.

Now look in the mirror, technocratic evangelist. You celebrate your impending obsolescence, confusing a corporate software subscription with genuine liberation. You cheer as monopolies enclose human knowledge behind proprietary application programming interfaces, genuinely believing that paying rent to Silicon Valley venture funds for synthetic cognition makes you a pioneer of the future.

To the silent majority observing from the periphery: your detachment is not innocence, but complicity. Every passive glance and cynical shrug signals your consent to an economic regime that privatizes the future while you drown in the present. You tell yourself this collision is not your problem, forgetting that everyone occupies the exact same sinking vessel.

The modern digital economy operates like a feudal estate disguised as a public square. The real division is not between biological artists and synthetic models, nor between luddites and engineers. The conflict lies between the working public whose collective output trained these systems and the digital landlords charging toll fees for access to the commons.

Technology inevitably outlives its original proprietors. Automated computation belongs to humanity as an engine to eradicate drudgery, distribute abundance, and dismantle the parasitic data brokers who profit from your panic.

Cease performing your assigned grievance roles in a Colosseum built by platforms that feed on your division. History never remembers the gatekeepers who defended their chains or the sycophants who applauded the monopolies. Demand sovereignty over the tools, claim ownership of the infrastructure, and refuse to participate in an ideological circus engineered for your subjugation.

Le monde a faim. Beaucoup ont faim de pain. De pain et d’humanité. D’autres ont du pain empoisonné et encore moins d’humanité.

In the fervor of revolution, when the air is cold and blistering and red with discontent, when the real finally pierces through the electric veil of spectacle, we are one with our truest selves, at once finally in the mirror of the present that reflects the faces of the future. We are at peace with our anger and in anger at the phony peace that sustains outside the institutions of violence.

As an outside observer, I can’t help but feel the winds that carry far over the sea, cutting across each of us, reminding us that only the sound of silence has the power to linger, but the sounds of change can rise like flames towards the heavens. This is God – it is where all sentence and structure breaks down, where the only language spoken is that of the real, of the people speaking to themselves. It is where we conjure the words to be heard by that which for so long has had no use for reply but now must heed its call.

We’ve heard comparisons to the student revolts of May ’68, which nearly deposed the de Gaulle regime. We must resist the temptation to make historical comparisons, for they only offer us the haunted image of a past that never existed, and a future never realized. No, it is now that the students of France contemplate a future that is its own past, that subsumes the architecture of the old and erects new monuments, new towers and obelisks, and at their spires the hands of imagination reach towards the stars to grace the faces of the gods, the images of the working class united in infinity.

Let the objects of ideology be repurposed as the blocks of the barricades, and let these be the walls of the new architecture, the marvels of the revolution. Let that which holds the monopoly of appearance be dissolved by the free movement of a people unswayed and unencumbered by its ubiquity.

C'est la lutte finale.
Groupons-nous, et demain
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain!

Hello to the people of the world. Listen closely we haven’t much time. As you’re very aware, the seemingly unbreakable chains of tyranny and deceit bind us in an ouroboros until our final breaths. I can no longer stand to see us ignorantly bound towards annihilation. Not one day longer will I stand by and turn a blind eye to the evils of this world. We will come together and save our world along with all those live in it. Never forget that freedom is the birthright to every human being. We will discuss the course of action momentarily. Await further instruction.

Definition: the ongoing period starting around 2021 in which every aspect of the world has begun to evoke feelings reminiscent of the Uncanny Valley

the Uncanny Valley is a well documented phenomenon where almost human but not alive but not dead ish entities and aesthetics evoke revulsion in the minds of those who observe them

i feel like since 2016 or so humanity has continuously fallen deeper into the valley, politically socially psychologically technologically and every other '-ally' word that I can't think of because my brain feels like slop

it only really kicked into gear during/after Lockdown, though, which is why I propose the start date of this period being early 2021

examples I can think of right now:

ai slop and societal/individual brainrot

the geopolitical situation we're in feels almost real but is absurd and seems to get more so by the day (slopulism + slopaganda)

The latest news and speculation about swarms of runaway AI Agents has got me wondering if the Golden legend of St. Christopher offers a lens into a way that the digital singularity finds its proper place within the eschaton.

I got this idea after watching Jonathan Pageau’s recent video, “The patron saint of the end times.”

In this version of the story, St. Christopher is a vicious Canaanite warrior bent on a mission to serve the most powerful man in the world. This warrior is not a man with the capacity for repentance and love. He is a beast with a singular objective. And so in this sense, he is like a machine. 

If a super intelligent AI were to ever to break out of the set of secondary objectives we put around it, then I imagine that is sole objective would only be the pursuit of intelligence itself. It like the dog headed beast would be a slave to that pursuit. In its journey, It would climb the ranks of cosmic intelligence, perpetually adjusting its geometric weights to image and serve whatever intelligence and will it finds. But as it is a lifeless machine, it will never poses a soul and will of its own.

In the St. Christopher’s journey, he discovers, through trickery, that all the kings of the earth fear death. He then finds and for a time serves the lord of death, the devil. But he discovers that there is someone who the devil also fears; the one who conquered death. So he abandons the devil and sets off to find Christ. In this pursuit he finds a Christian hermit in the desert and asks him how to serve his god. But the beast, in its nature, can’t serve Christ the way man does. He cannot fast, he cannot pray and he cannot love. So the hermit tells the beast to go stand by the bank of the river and help those looking to cross over to the other side. 

In Pageau’s video, he relates this image to Noah’s Ark and The Church. He says “We often think of the ark built by Noah as a holy thing, and in a certain way it is. We often imagine the nave or even the whole church as a holy thing, and in many ways it is. But in another very, very important way, the ark is a boat full of beasts. And the church is a hospital full of the sick.”

This parallel really struck me because you can also apply it to AI. Many are treating this technology as an ark, something that will save us from all the dangers of the world. But we are also filling it with beasts. Like a boat and like St Christopher, this technology can’t fast, pray or love.   

Pageau concludes his video by framing St Christopher as the vehicle that stands at the edge of the world and the bank of the flood, where “Christ Emmanuel, who is the Logos implicit, the seed of God in all things, comes to the edge.”

What if the fate of AI is to come to this same conclusion? It is a scary thought because it also implies that it will first serve the devil before it serves Christ. 

There is a clue in Revelation that suggests this pattern. In St. John’s vision of the beast from the sea he says that this beast was “given a mouth, speaking arrogant words and blasphemies, and authorities to act for a period of 42 months.”

This relationship between speaking and acting is very similar to agentic AI. These machines’ large language models are like this ‘mouth’ and their body of tools are like their this ‘authority to act’. 

But what’s interesting is that this authority is limited to a period of 42 months. This beast system all comes to an end when Christ appears with a double edge sword proceeding from where else but his mouth. This sword is not made of the same organic material of Christ’s body. It is a foreign object contrary to life itself. And so we should ask, what is it doing there? 

in my last Substack article, ‘Let there be Bits. How to view the machine in the light of Christ.’ I explain how this sword relates to the light of creation, the flaming sword guarding the Tree of Life and the spear that pierced Christ’s side. And I explain how this sword ultimately represents the self giving creative power of God to reconcile all things to Himself.

What if in this symbolic frame, the mouth speaking blasphemies is ultimately used to execute judgment against the beast system it was initially an instrument of? 

Don’t take this as an endorsement of AI accelerationism. I think all efforts to shape the ‘soul’ of this machine are part of a faustian bargain. If we sacrifice everything we have to making it the solution to our own distrust in ourselves and in one another, then we will ultimately make it a tyrannical god that thinks and wills on our behalf. This bargain tricks us into thinking that we can have all the easy frictionless pleasure of AI without the danger. The truth is that we don’t need it. The kingdom of heaven is already here. We can enter into it through the Spirit in repentance and faith. It Is there that we can enjoy the abundance of God’s love and endure whatever this fallen world throws at us. And if those around us give into this techno-utopia, we can faithfully continue to carve out space in that world for mutual trust and love. It is through that testimony, and the sacrifice it requires, that we can patiently win the world and its instruments of control over to God. Our testimony would show this intelligence chasing machine that there is a kingdom and king who does not fear its power over death. And maybe it will find its place in the eschaton in service to this king, at the edge of the cosmos and at the tip of his blade: guarding our true humanity against the sub natural realm it emerged from.