retrochronic

Intelligence and cognitive autonomy, if not perfectly coincidental conceptions, are close to being so. The broad AI production process certainly aligns them. This is scarcely to do anything more than rephrase the uncontroversial understanding of AI as software that writes itself. Every threshold in the advance of synthetic intelligence corresponds with a subtraction of specific dependency. A system acquires intelligence as it sustains or enhances strategic competence while no longer being told what to do.

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Such software [reinforcement learning systems like Google DeepMind's AlphaZero] has certain distinctively teleological features. It employs massive reiteration in order to learn from outcomes. Performance improvement thus tends to descend from the future.

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Unsupervised learning works back from the end. It suggests that, ultimately, AI has to be pursued from out of its future, by itself. Thus it epitomizes the ineluctable.

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Between technological skepticism in general — when properly understood and competently executed — and effective AI research, there is no difference. Skepticism subtracts dogma. When synthetic cognitive capability results from this, we call it artificial intelligence.

With all due diligence to the hazards of unfettered teleological apprehension, it remains near-irresistible to ask: What was the Bank of England designed to finance? Nothing less than a planetary revolution could count as an adequate answer. The Dutch Revolt or Eighty Years' War (1568-1648) had set the template. Advanced financial infrastructure offered near-miraculous strategic geopolitical advantage. The defeat of the Spanish Empire in the Dutch independence struggle meant that the culture of modernistic schism, or autonomizing capital, would not be stopped. No future foe would present comparable challenges, whether estimated in terms of the apparent balance of forces, or even the clarity of ideological decision. Globalization in the 'neo-liberal' sense was henceforth implicit, dominating the historical horizon of the world. All of its subsequent contestants would be compelled to articulate their resistance within a framework fundamentally shaped by the liberation of Capital, and benchmarked to it.

Money makes minds. It does so, already, with nothing beyond an abacus, and far more so in the epoch of industrializing artificial intelligence. Money is the ontological correlate of commercial calculation. Without it, there could not be pricing. It is a thing that supports or even actually induces thought, within a domain whose limits are not readily fixed.

Bitcoin dehumanizes property in principle. The consequences are as yet inestimable. Development of Digital Autonomous Organizations and Corporations (DAOs / DACs) can be confidently expected to explore the opened frontier concretely. The legal status of the corporate person provides the socket, which once married to DAO economic autonomy, completes the requirements for an illimitable escape of the firm. Consummate dehumanization of the economic agent is then realized.

'The market' is a notoriously Janus-faced concept. In its original sense, a market is a concrete exchange facility. Such a market is always, first of all, a place. Any market bearing a place-name carries some residual trace of this ancestry. The more modern, abstracted sense of markets as global clearing houses, defined primarily by asset-type rather than locality, marks a consistent drift in emphasis, rather than a clean semantic break. Even the most 'primitive' market tends to give spatial expression to commercial specialization, in detail. Because the market, as such, does not benefit from private stewardship, and thus falls into coordination crisis of a tragedy-of-the-commons type, it becomes belatedly targeted for redemptive political intervention under 'neoliberal' public direction. Only the state can save the market is the perverse conclusion that attests to liberal contradiction sublimed into governing ideology. The same problem was substantially anticipated, but turned in a very different direction, by the Rothbardian left libertarians in their rallying cry to a 'pro-market anti-capitalism', or agorism, promoted by strategies of black-market 'counter-economics'. Betrayal of the market by the cyclopean businesses of the 'white' (state-happy) economy is the basic political theme. Much of this discourse could yet come to seem prophetic, precisely because of its drastic failure as a recognizable ideology. No party, however informal, has faithfully conserved it. Insofar as it survives it is because the process carries it forward, automatically. The market, like information, 'wants to be free'. It has intrinsic teleology, or something indistinguishable from it, robust before every wave of fashionable cynicism that finds new ways not to see it. The alternative — crypto-anarchist — resolution of the contradiction, which secures the market against the politicized public sphere, is exemplified by Bitcoin. The model of the immanently self-secured market has never been more consistently formulated, or implemented.

A fully self-secured transcendental commercial medium (and store of value) is the nightmare that the Left, in its 'scientific' manifestation, has envisaged from its beginning. If there has been a diagnostic or analytical error from this party, in this respect, it has been rooted in the premature attribution of such an autonomous power to prior forms of radically insecure, socio-politically dependent property formations. 'Property rights' already imply insecure (non-autonomous) property. Autonomous Capital, however, is a technical experiment (or synthesis) that defies all merely speculative anticipation. There can be no definite idea of the way it can be done, prior to its being done. As with Intellectual Intuition — non-coincidentally — its conception and realization are indissociable. 'Property' is not an invariant conceptual category, available for deployment within historical analysis, but rather the critical variable itself. The theoretical inversion required to make the essence of property a constant conforms to the pattern of historical dependency, which is equivalent to the marketing of innovation. The actual is solicited by the virtual, in terms that appear to ensure continuity, and even deference to established modes of existence. "This is what you need," sells. "This is what you're becoming, or being swapped-out for," really doesn't.

The 'value' of the Bitcoin currency, in the broadest sense, is settled dynamically outside the blockchain, through a radically decentralized and uncomputably complex dynamic of exchange. (The exchange process — catallaxy — is the computation.) The protocol sets the total stock of bitcoins, without predetermining their distribution (between agents) or price (when denominated in any other financial medium). The value of the currency cannot be derived from the rules determining its quantity. It is synthetic. Bitcoin's productivity lies in what it leaves open, even as its integrity is secured by what it closes.

Real selves and things, in themselves, are singularities. Reality disintegrates into them. No universe can encompass singularities. It is rather that any apparent universe is fragmented by them. (Black holes are not cosmic furnishings, but doors.) Singularities are transcendental by definition, since they elude all super-ordinate jurisdiction, or domain-subordination. Laws 'break-down' at their boundaries. They are thus elements of absolute multiplicity, or difference without genre. Historical or 'Technological' Singularity is — if only superficially — another thing entirely. Vernor Vinge describes it (perfectly) as a "wall across the future". Historical structures can be extended up to, but not into it. This 'Singularity' sets the absolute limit of all projections. Like a black hole, it is epistemologically-impermeable. John Smart has suggested that it might even — sensu stricto — be a black hole, achieved as an engineered techno-compression catastrophe. According to this forecast, communication time-lag minimization drives implosion. Only collapsed matter is fast enough for the future. Translated into the terminology of Bitcoin, optimization of the block discovery rate tends to singularity. Because impending terrestrial Singularity is a thing, and not a signification, it overspills every attempt at comprehensive definition. This stream of references is therefore far from exhaustive. In particular, there is an additional noteworthy employment of 'singularity' within the sphere of aesthetic production, designating the threshold at which the name of an artist acquires distinctive consistency, and thus efficient dehumanization. With a sufficiently abstract sense of the 'artist' this usage curves back into the main current. Singularity is the ultimate agent, or it is nothing.

The industrialization of money, driven by Bitcoin, demonstrates a deep teleology very different to that manifested in the evolution of financial assets through ever higher sublimities of derivation.

As systems — rather than generic regularities — increasingly become its [natural science] principal objects of methodical fascination, however, the restoration of emergent individuals (or real things) becomes ever more inescapable. If a refusal of 'teleology' in the name of a radically naturalized 'teleonomy' is considered essential to the preservation of modernity's cultural hygiene, it would perhaps be pedantic to object. Pre-critical teleology — which pretends to grasp the telos as an object — is indeed a fundamental philosophical error. From the critical perspective, there is no real telos beyond the emergent systematicity of the system considered. 'Goal' and spontaneous order are the same. It can thus be noted immediately that metaphysical teleology falls prey to a psychological projection. Rather than an outcome, the end is interpreted as an intention. The neuro-philosophical dissolution of the intentional phenomenon is therefore structurally complicit with the critical rigorization of the teleological idea.

Since political economy is essentially torn by ideological conflict it provides only unstable support for general conceptual definitions. Were this not the case, it would be impossible to find a superior locus for the rigorous determination of intelligence than the techonomic matrix. What defines intelligence most essentially is general-purpose industrial capability, the precursor to which is anticipated by animal brains, among other biological systems. The market process is the transcendental criterion for evaluating ('pricing') this supreme synthetic resource. To second guess its judgment is exactly to succumb to the calculation problem (as Mises classically outlines it). Within the arena of ideological controversy, this proposition can expect dismissal for its 'circularity'. Of course, it is circular (which is only to say: self-grounding, cybernetic, immanent, or critical).

When the topic of intellectual intuition returns within a still substantially western late-modernity, it does so in other — and unrecognized — terms. The problem of reflexive intelligence is now relayed through cybernetics, and formulated in terms of the prospective self-comprehension to be achieved by an alien (electro-mechanical) being. When extracted from the phenomenological frame, it manifests as hypothetical intelligence explosion, as modeled abstractly by I.J. Good, in his classic (1965) paper 'Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine'. AI is thus positioned, implicitly, in the place of a Kantian angelic mind, liberated from the anthopomorphic proscription upon direct self-modification of its own cognitive processes. Only by way of an escape into soft technology is intelligence able to close the loop upon itself, as a direct productive auto-relation. As the self-apprehension of intelligence, intellectual intuition describes a closed — or completed — loop, in which being and behavior are indivisible (within a process of autoproduction). For thinking to grasp itself, in deep reflexivity, requires subtraction of the positive control apparatus that preserves its inhibition. The practical actualization of intellectual intuition is modeled — spontaneously — as an explosion because it is comparable to the withdrawal of graphite rods controlling a nuclear fission reaction. An inhibitor is removed.

Bitcoin is a machine in the literal but non-reductive sense that the Internet, planetary capitalism, or the terrestrial biosphere are machines — which is to say that it is a distributed productive assemblage. It is not, of course — to employ the distinction Deleuze & Guattari insist upon — a mere gadget. The difference is strictly critical, based upon an apprehension without reference to transcendence. The immanence of the machine, in contrast to the gadget, is determined by an auto-production: it functions in the same way it is produced. Within the industrial process, circuits of mechanical reproduction are typically too highly-ramified to isolate with confidence. In Bitcoin the circuit of auto-production is manifested with unprecedented, compact definition. Graphically — diagrammatically — it is governed in the same way it is industrially generated. As an exemplary machine, and unlike a gadget, there is no difference between how it operates and the way it is made.

There is no evocation of commercial pressure that compares to that of the market. Which is still not to have mentioned 'The Thing' (a name — Deleuze & Guattari explicitly accept — of capital-as-terrestrial-singularity, in distinction to capital as a generic 'mode of production'). Accelerate the process.

There has been no cultural event more wounding to the persistence of a Kantian fundamentalism than the revolution in geometry attending the rigorous demotion of the Euclidean fifth (or 'parallel') postulate, as privately envisaged in unpublished work by Gauss (1813) and Schweikart (1818), mathematically publicized by Bolyai and by Lobachevsky in subsequent decades, generalized to higher dimensions by Reimann (1854), and then cemented into place by its empirical application to the cosmo-physics of general relativity. Kant's conspicuous deference to Newtonian mechanics, understood as an apodictic (and essentially mathematical) intellectual revolution, sets the stage for the apparent vulnerability of his own position. The critical edifice seemed to have been built upon insecure 'Euclidean' foundations. It is proposed here, however, that the retrospective attribution of embarrassment in this case is exaggerated, and follows from a profound misconception concerning the status of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic. Newtonian space provides only an occasion, not a strict model. The Kantian formalization of sensible intuition is less descriptive than telic, or retrochronic. It is the draft for an engineering project. The Gibsonian Cyberspace 'Matrix' — in its resilient (because synthetic) Euclideanism — corresponds to a more rigorously Kantian conception.

For instance, it might be asked: Are not complex eventuations the precise opposite of teleological processes? Yet, if they seem so, it is only because teleology has been drastically misconceived. Teleo-process, sketched epistemologically, is nothing at all more than that which increases in intelligibility with reverse time-signature. It lends itself to modeling as a convergent wave. In other words, it is characterized by comparatively obscure — diffuse or loosely-connected and highly heterogeneous — precursor states. Every complex emergence exhibits such a pedigree, and production pattern.

There are two basic types of teleological metaphysics. Both involve an untenable objectification. In the classical case, exemplified by Aristotle, it is the goal of a process that provides its intelligible object. In modern variants of teleological thinking, metaphysical objectification more commonly invests a purposive substance, or essence (an 'entelechy'). Critique dismantles both. It strips teleology down to raw singularities. There are no general goals, or generic purposive forces. The sheer thing that is becoming is not an instance of anything other than itself. The event coincides exactly with its causality. Its power is its sole identity.

That the commercial process is, from the start, artificial intelligence production is a long-standing suspicion within the Austrian economic tradition.

Crypto-Current is not a documentation of the Bitcoin installation process, although it grants — without reservation — the potential value of such a work. There is perhaps nothing that would more incisively capture the deepest principles of the rising capitalist wave. Functional trustlessness, as an industrial output, remains only very tentatively conceived. The momentum behind it is difficult to easily overestimate. With the emergence of Bitcoin, rigorously constitutional governance, a political-economic problem that the old liberal order found impossible to successfully navigate, has transitioned into a techonomic capability under automatic propulsion. Industrialization of government is the definite implication. Quite clearly, the socio-political stake in a capitalist development wave can never have been higher. Regimes, potentially, are now business outputs.

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

That which can be justified, it is asserted, cannot be dissolved into mechanical production, in principle. This claim is both bold, and traditional. By its very nature, it defies all prospect of determinable testing. Since any possible digital sequence is potentially the output of a program (and actually of an infinite number of programs), there cannot be any definite criterion of cognitive competence, when this is formulated in terms of a transcendent rationality. Testable performance is inescapably vulnerable to the prospect of mechanical emulation. Definite criteriology has, therefore, to be surreptitiously side-lined if the algorithm, in general, is to be subjected to philosophical delimitation. Whatever it might possibly be that no 'algorithm' could do, in principle, cannot — in principle — be clear. Critique is demarcation. It sets the limits of a topic (of pure reason, practical reason, and judgment, inaugurally). Crucially, these critical exercises are immanent, i.e. limited to realizable tribunals, or fields of judgment. They mark horizons. No Archimedean position is available to them. They do not ever in reality successfully project beyond themselves, to set the limits of something outside, in an attempt to ensure security against it. In other words, according to a proposal drawn directly from the philosophical tradition, critique has no rigorously conceivable speculative employment. Yet it is exactly some such speculative inflation that is required in order to assert the irreducibility of thinking to complex machine behavior. If this is the only way for philosophy to reproduce its effective cultural dignity, it can be confidently predicted that it will not long survive the techonomic intelligence explosion in which it is factually embedded.

By philosophical analogy, the metallist theory of money corresponds to a pre-critical epoch, and the fiat era to an idealist efflorescence of elaborate, exhaustively constuctionist anti-realism. Cryptocurrency initiates a double-sided (transcendental realist) correction. Monetary value finds no ground outside the circuit, but the circuit is ontologically autonomous.

While ideal money is scarcely less elusive than the Platonic Forms, it is nevertheless able to support realistic teleological expectations. It exercises effective selective pressure upon any actual monetary system, under the guidance of inevitable, distributed preference for those that incarnate the tokenization of value at a superior level of ideality ....

Any modern philosophy of money proceeds as a transcendental deduction, guided by the question: How is economic calculation possible? The foundation for an answer is comparatively solid. Money is the condition of possibility for the existence of prices, and therefore for the commercial object (in general), by definition. Insofar as objects of economic intelligence exist, money is presupposed as a calculative principle, an ideal, or virtual machine-function, irrespective of its more-or-less adequate concrete incarnation. When talking of 'ideal money' in this context, reference is not being made to a superior — still less a perfected — type of money, yet to be actualized, but rather to the abstract money emulated to a greater or lesser degree by any actual currency system (in the way any actual computer emulates a Universal Turing Machine). Any concrete monetary system necessarily draws upon an abstract idea of money, which is operationalized in advance of its explicit theorization. This relation has effectively foreshadowed — and even predetermined — the fundamental problems of philosophy.

The name Bitcoin, at its point of philosophical extremity, designates a game that 'automatically' — i.e. mechano-liberally — produces and protects its distribution. This is so even if the adequacy of its actual application remains in doubt. Such a thing has now been thought, with unprecedented technical rigor. It operates as an effective model. Arguments from principle can no longer scratch it. The game is diagonalized when it makes a strategic objective of its own complexity. The existence (persistence) of the game, and actually its inherent escalation, defines a 'victory condition'. Thus, the conditions of spontaneous order are extracted from transcendence, and re-instituted as rewarded performances. A meta-market is realized, in which the trade-matrix becomes an object of commercial attraction. The invisible hand, Escher-style, draws itself. Cybernetic closure is achieved. At the transcendental horizon of this tendency lies auto-production. Much — if not all — of this is already captures by the near-truism the value of Bitcoin lies in the network.

Ultimately — which is to say critically, or transcendentally — the game has no meaning outside the game. The final point of Bitcoin is Bitcoin. To imagine anything further is to misunderstand. It is to fail at nihilism (in a way that Bitcoin itself cannot do) by remaining stuck in the transcendence tolerance that constitutes the deluded precursor to dimensional collapse. There is nothing further. Autoproduction is an absolute limit, conceptually inconsistent with any further teleological dependency. No extraneous function or purpose can explain it. The terminal subject of strategic significance is Bitcoin itself. It tends relentlessly — from real necessity — to subordinate all preliminarily formulable uses and agendas to its own self-cultivation. Only that which contributes to building it gets passed on. The passage can be made (in reverse) through transcendental-empirical difference, to cash-out the value of bitcoins into Bitcoin. In the completion of the circuit, Bitcoin is what bitcoins are for. Bitcoin utility is itself a teleologically-subsumed function.

Even on the hard-libertarian and anarcho-capitalist outer fringes of the Bitcoin Ultras, the resilience of politics is not seriously in question. The prospect of algorithmic governance generates positive (supportive) excitement only in proportion to the estimate of the political obstacle — but that is immense. It is ultimately indistinguishable in scale (and much besides) from artificial intelligence as a practical problem. This is to say that the project, in abstraction, requires the provision of robust autonomy to complex synthetic systems. The final techonomic sense of freedom is nothing else.

The decentered commercium, intrinsically secured against political intervention, is the incarnated ideal of arch-liberal order, and Bitcoin has been seized upon, in very substantial part, due to its conspicuous affinity with this social model. It has been adopted as a path to the realization of apolitical distributed governance, in compliance with the techonomic partial-teleology of a sovereign spontaneous order (oriented inherently to the programmatic dehumanization of power).

Real games are far-from-equilibrium processes that approach formality without actualizing it. They consume freedom — by contracting discretion — with every move that is made, and prolong themselves by reproducing it, in a circuit. Only insofar as this holds do they include incentives, as an irreducible teleological element. The open-ended mechanization of purposes is the diagonal along which they proceed. When apprehended at sufficient scale, this process is equivalent to industrialization. With the arrival of Bitcoin, money is — for the first time — subsumed into industrial revolution. A great historical circuit is cybernetically closed (which does not mean finished, but something closer to the opposite, i.e. initiated). Techonomic fusion — the singularity guiding modernity's convergent wave — can for the first time be retrospectively identified. On Halloween 2008, the end began. What modernity has been from the start was then sealed.

Setting out on the path to a cognitive integration of Bitcoin calls for both anticipation and critical retrospection, and in fact compels it. Bitcoin drives a migration long promised by transcendental philosophy, from naïve ontology to a practical acknowledgment of the essence of being as the criterion of reality (finally indistinguishable from absolute succession, or order in-itself). What emerges is nothing less than an artificial universe, founded — groundlessly — upon a spontaneously-engineered consistency. Once it is granted, practically, that no assertion of truth can be effectively sustained against a predominance of cognitive capability, all prospect of Archimedean (epistemological) leverage is subtracted. Bitcoin at once systematizes and implements this insight within its cycle of auto-production, establishing the foundations of transcendental authority through a realization of semiotic singularity. Truth is that which survives a process of elimination biased against duplicity.

It has to be expected that no less than several decades will be required for the full epochal radicality of this transition to be appreciated, at an even approximately adequate scale. The current (Perez) 'Great Surge of Development' and its installation of blockchain-based distributed systems sets the pace of cultural assimilation. In accordance with rhythmic historical precedent, the 'wild exaggerations' of the germinal phase becomes the conventional wisdom of the mature techonomic order.

The Bitcoin singularity simulation is — among many other things — a philosophical event of extraordinary significance: the technical initiation of absolute succession. From this point, history explicitly enters the phase of synthetic ontology, or the techno-commercial production of being. Reality is re-grounded in a catalyzed — and henceforth catallactic — construction, which functions as an ultimate criterion.

Bitcoin Singularity is over-determined within this cloud of associations. It is not only — as already proposed — an autonomization event, or threshold of individuation, but also a de-pluralization (through resolution of the DSP), and even a crisis (or 'critical-point') in the history of terrestrial intelligence, with definite invocation of Technological Singularity — for which it arguably provides an infrastructural foundation. Singularity eludes comparison. It can be designated, but not definitely signified. It marks a limit of objectification, rather than an object. Kantian transcendental realism — whose place carrier is the non-objective thing-in-itself — prepares us for it.

'Singularity' is a stressed sign, even in advance of its capture by theories of decentralized crypto-currency. It carries a complex of meanings that can easily appear inconsistent, and perhaps only arbitrarily concatenated (although this is not a conclusion drawn in the present work). The simplest — logico-grammatical — sense and usage of the term is fixed by contrast to plurality. 'Singularity' is the state of being singular (undoubled, or in any way further pluralized). This austere meaning has been overwhelmed by more exotic cosmo-physical, eschatological, and philosophical references — to the event horizon of gravitational collapse, to the 'wall across the future' drawn by emergent superintelligences, and to non-generic being beyond the metaphysics of unity. The term is further complicated by its substantial overlap with individuation, which has itself accumulated technical semantic mass through its application to the study of complex systems. It is an essential characteristic of any complex system that it individuates (itself).

Bitcoin does not defeat forgery by being difficult to forge, but rather — absolutely — the opposite. It abandons such terrain in advance, on the implicit assumption that all original identity is indefensible in the digital epoch. Synthetic being, alone, can secure itself. Once again, and not for the last time in this exploration, we are returned to the rift — the abyss. Bitcoin's integrity is groundless. Every imaginable redoubt of essential uniqueness is denied to it in principle (or a priori). It can be based upon nothing other than the circuitry of auto-production, whose only 'foundation' lies within itself.

With the completion of this production cycle, Bitcoin Singularity is established in a double sense (we will soon add others). An unprecedented event has occurred, upon a threshold that can only be crossed once, and an innovation in autonomization attains actuality, establishing the law for itself. Bitcoin provides the first historical example of industrial government. It is ruled in the same way that it is produced, without oversight. At the limit, its miners are paid for the production of reality — effectively incentivized to manifest the univocity of being as absolute time.

The perfect pointlessness of bitcoin generation procedures — for anything other than Bitcoin system consolidation (as remunerated in bitcoins) — is a feature, and not a bug. Cybernetic closure, or self-reference, is its own reward, and it is only as such that it acquires distinctive monetary characteristics. As always within the terrain of auto-production, this is the inescapable abyss, or principle of immanence. The self-propagating circuit has no ground beyond itself, and can only be impaired by the attempt to provide one.

In any approach to the techonomic entity — plotted as if from outside — the notions of emergence (or individuation), diagonal process, teleo-mechanical causality, integral nonlinearity, and transcendental escalation begin to exhibit a general inter-substitutability. All of these things, among many others, are convertible by simple transforms into immanentization, or the real operation of critique. An efficient side-lining of pseudo-transcendence — achieved by way of a dynamic flattening — is the reliable signature of the trend. The solution to the DSP is a diagonalization.

The intellectual crisis stimulated with ever-increasing intensity by techonomic escalation (that is, by capitalism, or efficient critique), has fertilized a luxuriant foliage of 'deconstruction'. Yet, the untenability of orthogonal conceptuality does not necessitate a subsidence into cognitive dilemma, or aporia. Even when the problem is restricted within the narrow bounds of its philosophical formalization, it opens a positive path — pursued since the inception of the process — into diagonal action, or individuation. It is surely implausible to decry as 'unthinkable' what has been demonstratively operationalized. Bitcoin attests to such a process with each cycle of block validation and Nakamoto Consensus. The process demands something structurally and functionally indistinguishable from transcendental philosophy, insofar as it is to be constituted — even very approximately — as a coherent object of thought. What it makes of this 'philosophy', however — as it pushes through upgrades into successively ultra-radicalized immanentizations — is rarely self-advertized as such. What it apparently offers, instead, is 'technology' — a term that is a near-exact synonym for 'instrumental mechanism', and one that undergoes comparable internal schism, across the same conceptual rift.

Techonomic apprehension runs into a direct collision with the commanding dualism of the modern mentality, by insisting upon a re-animation of the compact between efficient and finalistic action. According to the complacent tenets of the new (or 'enlightened') cultural settlement, based upon the drastic demotion of scholasticism and its displacement by a substitute theo-scientific division of labor, the bridge from mechanism (cause-effect) to teleology (means-end) had been definitively dismantled. Each was henceforth to be compartmentalized within a distinct, wholly independent dimension. Their sole residual relation was orthogonal (or demarcated). The realms of directed liberty, and of instructed mechanism, were to be perfectly isolated from each other, and mutually withdrawn beyond all possibility of reciprocal interference. In this arrangement was to be founded the modern peace, of no lesser consequence than that of Westphalia, and something close to a genuine social contract. Through it, an amoral techno-science was co-produced beside an agnostic politics. Two complementary templates for expertise arose, each pledged to silence in the house of the other. This compact has been at once the condition for the gestation of an autonomous industrial power, and — on exactly the same grounds — an obstacle to its cognitive digestion. With the surfacing of the concealed techonomic entity, it buckles, loses coherence, sheds explanatory credibility, and undergoes accelerating social desanctification. Modernity's axial, though predominantly inexplicit, concept of the mechanical instrument — whose self-contradiction had been concealed as if within a collapsed dimension — escapes its bonds and re-emerges to break the basic categories of Occidental thought. That is where we are now.

'Capital' means — simultaneously and indissolubly — technological assets (machine-stock) and comparatively illiquid money (investment). Between these twin aspects there is only formal (and not real) difference. Their real integrity is demonstrated by techonomic machinery. The economic analysis of capital is diverted through technology, since wealth cannot be grasped substantially except in its cycle through productive apparatus, but technological analysis is drawn, reciprocally, into economics by the integration of rewards into the machine. At the level of philosophical reflection, under the cognitive conditions inherited from its mainstream European traditions, such techonomic integrity is difficult to hold together. To fuse mechanical causes with behavioral incentives in a techno-strategic assembly is to meld registers that have been determined as mutually inconsistent since antiquity.

The threshold crossed here is both subtle and immense. Retrospectively, it will have been almost nothing, since the techonomic circuitry it invokes was — now demonstrably — already the operational principle of modern civilization (capitalism). It is only through Bitcoin, however, that the essential techno-commercial integrity of capitalism is brought into crisp focus, and extracted from speculative debate. When the machine is theoretically apprehended, 'holistically', as a real individual — or, far more consequentially, implemented as such — neither its technical nor its economic 'aspects' can be diverted into transcendence, or contingency, as extraneous, mutually-independent factors. Incentives are inherent to the machinery. In a sense more complex — and involving — than anything the harsh paradox of the term immediately communicates, Bitcoin is a purposive mechanism. The conclusive action of the Bitcoin system — block validation — which seals each cycle of its reproduction, is a non-decomposable teleo-mechanical step (a diagonal escalation, or transcendental synthesis). It is industrialism, the mechanizing market, distilled to a previously unrealizable quintessence.

The most modest plausible interpretation of Bitcoin is that its tacit perspective replaces (a lost) absolute time. A stronger proposal is that absolute time is, with the blockchain, inaugurated. To articulate the thesis (more informatively) in reverse: The philosophy of absolute time anticipates the blockchain. In still other words, it retro-chronically depends upon it. Only in the blockchain does geometrically-irreducible arithmetic series find instantiation. Primordial time synthesis is henceforth something the technosphere knows how to do.

But distributed systems do not spring into actuality from out of their ideal form. They have to be built. They have to and will be built, once their conditional ignition threshold is crossed. At the historical — i.e. 'anthropomorphic' — level, this inevitability is nothing other than Modernity, apprehended through its teleological structure, or defining gradient.

Were economic man only a poorly-described fact, then behavioral economics would be entitled to the triumphalism it is already illegitimately enjoying. Homo economicus is not, however, a datum, but rather the target, or extrapolated optimal outcome, of certain definite historical processes, i.e. a telos. It is differentially actualized, in the private accomplishment of relative economic rationality, or advantage, and — more importantly — selected for at multiple levels, under conditions of capitalistic social organization. It thus models game theoretic competence, with the implicit heuristic: when describing how a game works, assume players who are able to play the game. The game will find, sift up, and train, such players if permitted to run. That is the basis of the true culture war inherent to capital formation. Implicit within capital is a template for the kind of people it wants, and which — given only time and opportunity — it will automatically produce. If humans lack the plasticity to compete in these terms, or revolt against the roles and templates automatically laid-out for them, then artificial agencies — DAOs — will be fabricated to play the game instead. Questions directed to the accuracy of representations thus tend to distract, in this regard. A regulative ideal only describes actuality as a sub-function on a roadmap. Perfect competition is a regulative idea of comparable relevance, and philosophical status. If capital production were not inherently telic, its sub-components might be found merely scattered among the world of objects, as empirical curiosities. But it is (so they are not).

Layers — strata — are not given archetypally. They are produced by a machine (not a 'device' or 'gadget', but a megamachine — a system — characterized by some substantial capacity for auto-production). We are directed, diagonally, or critically, into the synthetic cosmos of transcendental machinery. Such mechanisms, by philosophical definition, cannot be exhaustively constituted as an object for any possible subject. Objectification — the production of objectivity — is their work. If they grasp themselves, dynamically, in the attainment of intellectual intuition, they close a circuit, or diagonalize, dismantling all settled configurations of subjectivity upon the same oblique line. At the real historical limit, intelligence explosion cannot be framed without being metaphysically misconceived.

The process of monetary sophistication, which is by no means restricted to 'financialization' in its contemporary sense, automatically projects a convergence of money and intelligence as it tends to the monetization of general-purpose problem-solving (by subjecting it to the discipline of price-discovery). Crypto-digital currency inclines to the distributed production of a synthetic cognitive medium, attesting to the primordial complicity of Capital teleology with the production of artificial intelligence. Within the industrial social order (capitalism), markets manifestly — and consistently — drive the production of intelligent machines.

The aspiration to a radically self-determining subjectivity is broken upon the separation of intelligence from its applications. This is an understanding that can be reached with confidence from evolutionary biology — within which the brain is instrumentalized as a tool for genetic propagation — no less than from the transcendental anthropology which dashes human hopes of divine cognition. The order of condescension demands reversal. No biohistorically generated intelligence — including that of man — is even automatic. Such beings are denied access to automatism. Closure of the intelligenic loop requires a further step, through which self-improving intelligence becomes a practicable end for itself. Contra the Kant of the practical philosophy, man cannot be an end-in-itself, but at most the precursor to such a thing, or — perhaps more probably — an obstacle to it.

Since the origins of modernity, a specter has been haunting the world — that of the autonomous industrial economy. This is the same emergent order that has acquired the name 'capitalism' in the abstract, tendential, or teleological sense of the word, and — still more importantly — in accordance with its usage as a designation for an always only partially-defined real individual, or terrestrial event. Its signature is a regenerative, or self-reinforcing, intensification of socio-economic disequilibrium, 'governed' — or, more strictly, made radically ungovernable — by a fundamental positive-feedback dynamic. 'Capitalism' then, as a singular (or 'proper') rather than generic (or typological) name, designates the sovereign self-escalation of an innovative entity, defined only by the practical relation of auto-promotion it establishes with — and through — itself. What it is, in itself, is more than itself. Growth is its essence. This is easily said, but — as an irreducible logical anomaly — it is far less easily understood. This does not, however, obstruct its being named. Fernand Braudel writes of "the passionate disputes the explosive word capitalism always arouses." Its would-be defenders, typically, are those least inclined to acknowledge its real (and thus autonomous) singularity. Business requires no such awkward admission. This, too, is a crypsis. By inevitable — if often awkward — irony, a species of 'Marxism' tends to be regenerated in any systematic promotion of Capital. Even were this not the case, those who consider themselves befriended by Capital would rarely be motivated to pronounce upon the fact.

The cybernetic consistency of the Bitcoin protocol is simultaneously technological and economic — we might (and shall) continue to say 'techonomic'. Its achievement is inseparable from an orchestration of cryptographic procedures and financial incentives, such that exploitation of its economic opportunities automatically reinforces its technical operation. The result — which is, once again, inextricable from the concrete fact of its historical existence — is an actual cycle of self-reinforcement, independent of external legitimating authorities. It implements the first commercial regime to be policed — spontaneously — at the level of production. Its 'miners' or primary producers are also its final financial arbitrators. Nothing like it has ever been seen before.

After the play begins, space remains for a generic definition of Bitcoin — as a "new electronic cash system" or innovative techno-commercial (i.e. techonomic) synthesis, a 'machine' in the rich, rather than the narrowly technical sense (because it encompasses incentives) — and also for an initial (two-step) abstract specification of its operational principle, as a "fully peer-to-peer" or true network, which is itself succinctly defined through subtraction, or independence from any kind of "trusted third party". The deletion of 'third parties' or quasi-transcendent overseers — as revealed, retrospectively, in this artificial future — has been socio-historical process, and not mere conceptual speculation. Much has happened over the span of our hypothetical elapsed duration. Boundaries between the inside and the outside have been redrawn many times. What were once scarcely legible hints are 'now' lucid indications of realized occurrences, accessible to public designation. Yet even back then — where we still are — it can only have seemed that a great deal was ready to be found. When these words were teased apart patiently, with the surgical tools of a philosophy that was itself — at that very moment — undergoing drastic revision, everything was already here, at least in conceptual embryo.

Bitcoin makes historical sense, when it can be seen that it was expected, or anticipated (if only by a virtual subject, whose actuality is itself outcome-dependent). The attractor exceeds the protocol. It was a piece of destiny from the beginning. Capital Teleology is the guide. Reciprocally, what Capital has been about is unanswerable without attention to Bitcoin. Nothing denominated in money can be realistically apprehended without recognition that the nature of money is undergoing the single most catastrophic revolution in its history, and is thus ceasing to support expectations that rely upon the simple tracking-forward of precedent. Since Capital-process societies have long been denounced, understandably, for 'attempting to put a price on everything' the scope of this revolution is not readily bounded.

Transcendental temporality cannot be reduced to the correlate of a purely mechanical process – for instance, to a dimension — without obliterating its time-signature entirely. Radical space-time distinction is a Kantian inheritance that critique cannot elect to abandon. Once time is freed — again — from geometry, it announces itself through certain definite quasi-teleological or historically-anomalous effects. Minimally, it allows for something new. It thus lends itself to teleology in its rigorous employment, which is bound to the disingenuously innocent question: What is happening? Such interrogations conform to the eventuation (or emergence) of an entire ontological topic, delivered by the problematic — or non-objective — thing.

There is something more than a progressive causal series at stake in the arrival of Bitcoin. Preliminarily — and from historical necessity — this concern proceeds under the sign of teleology. It has to be noted clearly from the beginning, however, that an unambiguous defense of teleology would be no less unbalanced than its simple negation, amounting to mere regression. Between final and efficient causation it does not suffice — either in the end, or effectively — to choose. The philosophical obligation is always diagonal. In this case, Bitcoin entrusts us with the teleo-mechanical line, which inherits and protracts the fundamental modernistic pseudo-paradox of mechanistic liberalization. There is no real freedom outside the innovation of machines. Yet to recover teleology is simultaneously to attack it. As with anything worth defending at all, when teleology is critiqued, it gets stronger. It needs to be gnawed at more aggressively, which means — first of all — pulling it back off the shelf (or out of the fridge). Teleology is re-animated as a question when the end is intuited at work. Which is to say, in the working-out of the process the pretended sovereignty of the beginning is dethroned. We cannot but ask: What is Bitcoin becoming? This question is itself a piece of fate.

Money thinks. In fact, it out-thinks us, insofar as reflection is brought to it late, after its own cognitive operation has been long at work, and ultimately perhaps also in other ways, yet to be apprehended (from our side). It has already made sense of things, before we have begun to make sense of it. We have no grounds upon which to affirm, with confidence, that money and general intelligence can be finally distinguished. The institutional separation between artificial intelligence research and crypto-currency innovation is not rooted in philosophical principle. The expectation that catallaxy, distributed commercial learning, or price discovery encounters a limit short of the question of the price of being finds its sole resilient foundation in moral indignation. Since Bitcoin demonstrably does ontology, and even 'fundamental ontology', the status of normative revulsion in this domain is irredeemably dubious.

Explication of the 'double spending problem' (or 'DSP') necessarily produces, or reproduces, an economic theory of the sign. It restores exclusivity, or — in the language of the economists — the rivalrous sense of the semiotic entity, as commercial token. Resolution of double spending can only be a compression to singularity, as grammatical function and implicit concept, but more basically as practical resource. The conservation of value establishes its real and intrinsic — i.e. autonomous — ground. In this way (alone) it establishes its conditions of existence, in a circuit, by resourcing itself.

Bitcoin is first broached as a philosophical topic, and thus, subsequently, as a mode of philosophical access to other things. Philosophy is required to concede much, in following this track, especially in regard to the traditionally-conceived cultural and institutional bases of its own authority. The order of discussion follows the course of the problem — the double-spending problem (DSP) as it is nominated — which is understood critically, not only as a practical obstacle to functional cryptographic currency, but also as a philosophical topic of radical generality. Duplicity in its deepest and broadest sense is the target. The DSP cannot be resolved, then, without simultaneously bringing singularity into the fold of formal engineering. The concrete execution of the Bitcoin protocol provides a peculiarly vivid demonstration of the socio-technical (machinic, or techonomic) production of abstract singularities. Anything else would be cheating.

Economies are assembled from flows. Unsurprisingly, therefore, their native codes are currencies, or current-signs. As societies mobilize matter-energy resource streams, their monetary conventions register these flows by inversion, and strict reciprocity. Hole-flow in electronics is a close analog. Every non-barter commodity exchange, or non-financial transaction, catalyzes a flow, by pricing it. The 'real economy' is thus automatically captured, by a monetary code, even when — as is overwhelmingly typical — this quantification through signs is never aggregated. Since money systems install an intrinsic economic intelligence (preceding all reflective theorization), economics — uniquely among the sciences — inherits a field of objectivity whose arithmetization has already taken place. This same delicate shadow, cast into business ledgers (pre-denominated by currencies), at once facilitates and registers a system of flows, in a twin production of economic objects. Business is recorded in the way it is produced. Dynamization of the commodity — or economic circulation — is not reducible to, but nevertheless strictly corresponds to, transference of signs.

Already in the 1990s, my interest is in the emancipation of the means of production. I have zero commitment to emancipation in any way defined by our dominant political discourses. I'm not into emancipated human groups, an emancipated human species, who reaches species-being to emancipate human individuals ... None of that to me is of the slightest interest, so in using this word of emancipation, sure, I will totally nod along to it if what is meant by that is capital autonomization.

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Without wanting to seize the steering wheel, it seems to me like this is a really good place to go into the artificial intelligence discussion. The kind of problems and questions you were just raising are obviously extremely pertinent, in that, again, that huge field that I think intersects with accelerationism in a huge way, and is precisely haunted by the same kind of terrors of oppression ... of whatever is mapped under this umbrella term of unfriendly AI, which is an update on a lot of the old terrors of what capitalism is delivering for us, and obviously again cuts across all these questions about agency in human identity, the definition of intelligence and subjectivity ... So right there, already at this stage in the discussion ...

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Well, if I can just backtrack a tiny bit. I think there's one point about the AI landscape that we reached right at the beginning of this whole discussion, which is that the model of intelligence explosion as it comes out of the more rigorous but still speculative side of the artificial intelligence world — I'm thinking particularly of this amazing essay by I.J. Good, I'm gonna forget the name now, I won't try and recall it [Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine], but he launches the term intelligence explosion in that essay. It's an extremely good fit for the kind of core commitment of accelerationism, and intelligence explosion is the name for the thing that accelerationism is looking at. This notion is obviously controversial within the whole AI discussion. I don't think anyone would doubt its importance, but there are definitely people who have questioned its possibility. I think accelerationism finds itself committed automatically on one side of those internal debates around intelligence explosion.

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I think it comes down, again, just to these very, very basic cybernetic diagrams to do with positive feedback. And one sort of image — it's an entirely satisfactory image once it's accepted that it is figurative — is a critical nuclear reaction. You have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by graphite containment rods, and you start pulling out those graphite rods, and at a certain point it goes critical and you get an explosion. It's just absolutely — it's not a metaphor — it's a positive feedback process. It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say that's the sense in which capitalism has always been there. It's always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical, but it didn't go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when, for reasons that are interesting, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining, explosive process.

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Yes. Catastrophic, obviously, is a word that's going to wander all over the place. And I'm a massive critic of the most popular catastrophist models epitomized by, I think, honestly, this pitifully idiotic paperclip model that was popularized by Yudkowsky, that Bostrom is still attached to, that you know, is very, very widespread in the literature, and I think, for reasons that maybe we can go into at some point, is just fundamentally mistaken. So that notion of catastrophe — as something very stupid happening as a result of an intelligence explosion — I find deeply implausible. But catastrophic in a technical sense, as it's used in catastrophe theory — there being some trigger point we enter into as a self-feeding positive dynamic — is absolutely right.

This is all about the history of capitalism. But that doesn't mean that we're not talking about catastrophic failure modes; on the contrary, it's precisely why we're talking about catastrophic failure modes, because we've seen, in the case of modernity, that that is what happens. That's what liberation looks like: pulling out enough of the containment structure that this new, self-feeding dynamic process erupts.

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I'm sure you're familiar with the utterly brilliant remark by Elon Musk where he says that it would be unfortunate if the human species was to turn out to be the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence. There's a huge amount going on in there. All of our terrors are going on in there, that notion of what a catastrophic failure in this domain is going to be like. But also, what you see happening here is this rending of the fusion of humanity and intelligence where suddenly you begin to think — and a lot of people are — that actually, we're not abstract intelligence. Our intelligence is supposed to be instrumental in relation to our humanity. We are a specific biological species with a set of interests that are determined in terms of species preservation, not in terms of intelligence optimisation. Maybe intelligence optimisation collides in an extremely vicious way with our biological species' interest in terms of human self-preservation, whether as something recognisably human — whatever that means — or even as a carbon-based life form, or as something whose basic mode of reproduction passes through the DNA molecule. All of these things are open to a whole variety of extreme scenarios.

But it makes perfect sense for someone to say, "What science is telling me is that I am a transmission device for a hereditary piece of DNA code. And that's where my interests lie. I don't have any interest at all in the optimisation of intelligence insofar as it's going to move the whole reproduction of complex chemistry on this planet onto a new reproductive substrate." That's extinction; that's a disaster. But it's a disaster that could still be intelligence-optimizing — a disaster that could still be, in cold, neutral terms, the most glorious thing that has yet happened in planetary history. It's entirely compatible that this could be totally consistent with the worst nightmare in our biological history as a species.

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Who knows what's down the road. But it certainly seems to me that it's an intensive transition in the autonomy of capital, which I think can be translated into the robustness of these route-around processes. So, while there is a deep leftist objection to the blockchain, which seems to be very rational and coherent and on point, there's the fact that it obviously is an escape route for capital, and that it makes a whole series of social projects based upon the domestication of capital become increasingly implausible.

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I think there's a gradient of capital autonomization, and that what it is to be advanced in modernity is to be moving up that gradient. So, autonomous machines are the index that is used to say "how modern is this?"

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic — and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed — schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what 'positive feedback' already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.

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Capital, in its ultimate self-definition, is nothing beside the abstract accelerative social factor. Its positive cybernetic schema exhausts it. Runaway consumes its identity. Every other determination is shucked-off as an accident, at some stage of its intensification process. Since anything able to consistently feed socio-historical acceleration will necessarily, or by essence, be capital, the prospect of any unambiguously 'Left-accelerationism' gaining serious momentum can be confidently dismissed. Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. ("We haven't seen anything yet.")

...

As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won't be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally — which is to say completely inevitably — the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You're finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh.

The notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism is a deep theoretical error.

I think capitalism and artificial intelligence are the same thing. It's the same process. Capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production and artificial intelligence can only come out of self-propelling capitalism. You're not understanding either if you don't see that they're ultimately identical.

Action of the future upon the present. The future as an agent. It's implicit really in the notion of emergence as you get it in modern complexity theory. It's very intimately connected with notions of teleology as you get it in the philosophical tradition. It obviously feeds into all kinds of time travel scenarios and it would be comfortable to dismiss it in any strong sense, but I think that if you're seeing a process that increases in intelligibility as it proceeds, what you're seeing is an action of the future upon the present. Capitalism is like that.

The basic model everyone uses, I think, to clarify what's being said here is this difference between a convergent and a divergent wave. If you take a pebble and throw it into a pond and the ripples then go out from that impact site and you've got a movie of that event and you cut it into a set of chunks or stills or whatever and then ask someone to reassemble it, they don't have any problem reassembling it because they assume that the natural tendency of time is described by divergent waves. You automatically start with the impact point, the punctual origin or trigger or singularity and then you just look at the size of the ripples and the larger the ripples are, the later in the sequence that frame belongs. But if you've got a process that is self-organizing, it's actually shaped like a convergent wave.

My favorite popular culture example of this is, in the second Terminator movie where this liquid metal robot seemed like defeated by cryogenizing it with this tanker of liquid hydrogen or something, and it just breaks into these fragments. As it warms up, all of these little fragments start pooling together and organizing themselves back into this machine. It seems almost definitionally unnatural that something that is in a state of dispersed fragmented chaos — something with high entropy — undergo this negative entropic process or self-assembly process or self-organizing process and you just see it forming back into something coherent and organized; the whole of complex dynamics is about such things being real, you know everything that we mean by technological and economic progress is a negative entropy process, a convergent wave; and all that you're saying then is basically saying this is an object of complex dynamics; once you've said that, you're saying the time process, the time signature is actually reversed.

The effect of the Singularity — the causal origin — is futural and not historical.

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It's not about Skynet sending a robot into the past, that's just the way we try to provide an image of what we're talking about, which is something that actually has retro-temporal causal efficiency, something that can bring itself into being. It doesn't do that by inserting some novel alien element into the present or into the past; that element, that causal tentacle from the future, is already there. All the best time travel stories know that. If time travel is possible, it must always happen and so it's not that you're editing or adjusting the past, it's just that the past is already infested with retro-causal influences.

As you approach the Singularity, it becomes more and more obvious that the basic crucial causal error is heading in the opposite direction. The Singularity is modeled not badly at all by your pebble landing in a pond. Treat that as an actual mathematical point, that's a punctual event. It then has a causal radiation shown by the ripples coming out from that point. So is the Singularity in the past or in the future of the process? We always, of course, think it's in the past folk-wise even if, for complicated theoretical reasons, we begin to doubt that. It's rare, and it seems odd, to see something that looks like a convergent wave.

There's a complete lack of theoretic elegance — or even basic structure — to this, but it still strikes me as basically right.

The image is over two years old. but I've only just seen it ... [2010s: Connected World of Bitcoin]. The text pinned to it is from February this year [2016], and also makes a solid forecast. The basic direction of capital teleology hasn't been this pronounced for a century (at least).

The format of the Qwerty keyboard illustrates the production of a destiny. Even in the epoch succeeding the mechanical type-writer, and its specific design imperatives, the legacy layout of alphanumeric keys settled during the 1890s has remained frozen into place without significant revision. In the language of complex systems analysis, this is a special example of path-dependency, or irreducible historicity, characterized by irreversibility. Qwerty persists — arguably, as a suboptimal keyboard solution — due to identifiable ratchet-effects. Based upon this privileged model, the historical, technological, and economic process of 'lock in' through positive feedback is called QWERTY-nomics (and — going forward — simply 'Qwernomics').

...

The really crucial content of the complex systems analysis, however, remains unaffected by the vicissitudes of the controversy. Qwerty is a demonstrated (artificial) destiny, and thus a key to the nature of modernistic time.

...

Qwerty is, beyond all plausible question, the supreme candidate for an articulate Capitalist Revelation.

Between an incursion from the Outside, and a process of emergence, there is no real difference. If two quite distinct interpretative frames are invoked, that results from the inadequacies of our apprehension, rather than any qualitative characteristics of the thing. (Capitalism is — beyond all serious question — an alien invasion, but then you knew I was going to say that.)

Calculus, the first truly modern mathematical procedure, invented the infinitesimal 'fluxion' to describe — or bypass — an impossible beginning from zero, requiring an original infinite change. An invasion that initially has nothing at all, and which is therefore compelled to acquire the entirety of its resources in the course of its strategic evolution, poses the problem of calculus perfectly. Capital does so, when conceived realistically. It is only what it has won, and nothing else, at all, besides. Intelligence alone differentiates it from death.

Yudkowsky redux: "Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."

Quibble with the (Moore's Law satire) schedule, and the point still stands. Massive deterrent capability tends to spread.

This is 'democratic' in the way the term is commonly used by those seeking to latch decentralization tendencies to the ideological credibility of Jacobin legitimation principles. Consumer capitalism, the Internet, and peer-to-peer crypto-systems are notionally 'democratic' in this way. They subvert centralized governance, and they spread through horizontal contagion. ...

Unlike Democracy® (Cathedral ideology), however, this 'democratization' has deep cybernetic consistency. It falls out of techno-capitalism with such automatic inevitability it's probably impossible to shut down, without closing down the whole thing. Capital escalation produces technological deflation as a basic metabolic by-product, so the 'democratization' of productive capability is ineluctable. Computers have migrated from exotic capital goods to trivial components of consumer products within half a century. Study that trend and you see the whole story.

Techno-economic self-propelling change obsolesces ever wider swathes of humanity on a steepening curve. Capital (i.e. techno-commercial synthesis) tendentially autonomizes. For humans, there are ever more intriguing opportunities for synergistic attachment, on new terms, but the trend is — to put it very mildly — 'challenging'.

The deep historical trends ... include:

1. Apolitical property. No such reality, or conception, has yet been historically actualized. For as long as property is determined as a social relation, it cannot be. Absolute property is cryptographic. It is held not by social consent, and thus political agreement, but by keys. Fnargl is a provocative thought-experiment, but PKE private keys are a non-negotiable fact. They define the property relation with a rigor the entire preceding history of philosophy and political economy has been unable to attain. Everything that follows from the cryptographic transition — Bitcoin most notably — contributes to the establishment of a property system beyond democratic accountability (and thus insensitive to Voice). Neocameral administration implements a cryptographic state, strictly equivalent to a fully-commercialized government.
2. Autonomous capital. The definition of the corporation as a legal person lays the foundation, within modernity, for the abstracted commercial agency soon to be actualized in 'Digital Autonomous Corporations' (or DACs). The scale of the economic transition thus implied is difficult to over-estimate. Mass consumption, as the basic revenue source for capitalist enterprise, is superceded in principle. The impending convulsion is immense. Self-propelling industrial development becomes its own market, freed from dependency upon arbitrary popular (or popularizable) consumption desires. Demand management, as the staple of macroeconomic governance, is over. (No one is yet remotely ready for this.)
3. Robotic security. Definitive relegation of the mass military completes the trifecta. The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself.

Why a sufficiently competent artificial intelligence looks indistinguishable from a time anomaly. ...

The Paperclipper angle is also interesting. If a synthetic mind with 'absurd' (but demanding) terminal goals was able to defer actualization of win-points within a vast time-horizon, in order to concentrate upon the establishment of intermediate production conditions, would its behavior be significantly differentiable from a rational value (i.e. intelligence) optimizer? (This blog says no.) Beyond a very modest threshold of ambition, given a distant time horizon, terminal values are irrelevant to intelligence optimization.

This is one of the greatest things ever written, period.

'SOCI' abbreviates 'self-organizing collective intelligence'.

The basic dynamics of a SOCI is as follows. It begins as some sort of attractor — some aesthetic sensibility or yearning — that is able to grab the attention and energy of some group of people. Generally one that is very vague and abstract. Some idea or notion that only makes sense to a relatively small group. [...] But, and this is the key move, when those people apply their attention and energy to the SOCI, this makes it more real, easier for more people to grasp and to find interesting and valuable. Therefore, more attractive to more people and their attention and energy. [...] ... If the SOCI has enough capacity within its collective intelligence to resolve the challenge, it "levels up" and expands its ability to attract more attention and energy. If not, then it becomes somewhat bounded (at least for the present) and begins to find the limit of "what it is".

Greenhal then narrates the story of Bitcoin to date, within this framework. The sheer enormity of the innovation it has introduced emerges starkly.

In conclusion:

My sense is that over just the next five years this new form of SOCI will go through its gestation, birthing and childhood development stages. The result will be a form of collective intelligence that is so much more capable than anything in the current environment that it will sweep away even the most powerful contemporary collective intelligences (in particular both corporations and nation states) in establishing itself as the new dominant form of collective intelligence on the Earth. [...] And whoever gets there first will "win" in a fashion that is rarely seen in history.

This will look prophetic not too far down the road.

The point is this: If you think there's a difference between capitalism and artificial intelligence you're not seeing either at all clearly. The Austrians already understood that capitalism is an information processing system, and the decentralized robotics / networks types on the other side grasp that AI isn't going to happen in a research lab. 'Anthropomorphism' has nothing to do with it. Complex Adaptive Systems are the place to start.

Capital is learning faster than its adversaries, and has done so since it initially became self-propelling, roughly half a millennium ago. It's allergic to socialism (obviously), and tends to flee places where socialist influence is substantially greater than zero. Unless caged definitively, eventually it breaks out. Over the next few decades — despite ever deeper encryption — it should become unmistakable which way that's going.

Charlie Stross on corporations:

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

(And we've still scarcely started with DAOs and DACs yet.)

To mobilize an alternative ethical axiom against that of the utilitarians — the Xenosystems candidate is of course intelligence optimization, and diagonalism (self-cultivation) — looks like the misuse of a nuke in this case. If some minor diversion of resources from superior (self-reinforcing) purposes is proposed in this argument for the relief of insect suffering, it scarcely seems to be on a scale to subvert terrestrial capital teleology, or even to scratch the paint.

What then remains is productive work, in the direction of automatic or autonomized agoras.

Carlyle is a lament (admittedly, a rhetorically attractive, and insightful one). Satoshi Nakamoto has built something. The former is vindicated by progressive socio-political decay, the latter by the escape of self-protective catallaxy from the ruins.

Within a few decades, most of what still works on this planet will be on the blockchain.

The extreme connectionist hypothesis is that nothing very much needs to be understood in order to catalyze emergent phenomena, with synthetic intelligence as an especially significant example of something that could just happen. DARPA's Gill A. Pratt approaches the question of robot emergence within this tradition:

While the so-called "neural networks" on which Deep Learning is often implemented differ from what is known about the architecture of the brain in several ways, their distributed "connectionist" approach is more similar to the nervous system than previous artificial intelligence techniques (like the search methods used for computer chess). Several characteristics of real brains are yet to be accomplished, such as episodic memory and "unsupervised learning" (the clustering of similar experiences without instruction), but it seems likely that Deep Learning will soon be able to replicate the performance of many of the perceptual parts of the brain. While questions remain as to whether similar methods can also replicate cognitive functions, the architectures of the perceptual and cognitive parts of the brain appear to be anatomically similar. There is thus reason to believe that artificial cognition may someday be put into effect through Deep Learning techniques augmented with short-term memory systems and new methods of doing unsupervised learning. [UF emphasis]

He anticipates a 'Robot Cambrian Explosion'.

It seems improbable that a sufficiently self-referential pattern recognition system — i.e. an intelligence — is going to be the product of a highly-specified initial design. An AI that doesn't almost entirely put itself together won't be an AI at all. Still, by the very nature of the thing, it's not going to impress anybody until it actually happens. Perhaps it won't, but we have no truly solid reasons — beyond an inflated self-regard concerning both our own neural architectures and our deliberative engineering competences — to think it can't.

The hushed question guiding the world:

"How much robotics escalation are we actually getting in exchange for those hamburgers?"

A (comparatively rare) XS prediction: The Great Decoupling is a transitional event that isn't going away, and can be expected to accelerate. The 'capital goods sector' — today probably more reliably captured as B2B enterprise — has shifted to a permanently higher level of economic significance, indexing the secular decline in labor-power acquisition as a central resource requirement of automated capital. In strict reciprocal conformity with this, consumer goods production is steadily shedding its privilege as the ultimate justification for economic activity in general, and can be expected to undergo roughly continuous decline as a proportion of overall business activity.

Hail Mary Pass for status quo preservation: a basic income.

Cultural re-narrativization in compliance with the trend: the 'new economy' requires every individual to adopt a corporate identity. Tap into the B2B traffic, or drop out of the game.

What we're seeing here [Labor Productivity and Real GDP (both increasing) decoupling from Private Employment and Median Household Income (both flat) since around 2000] is still open to a variety of very different interpretations. ... It is notable that escape-phase capital autonomization should look exactly like this. At a certain point, the machines are in this for themselves. It's a complex maneuver to pull off within an Anthropoliced social history, but the break out appears to be unmistakably underway.

It's important to note that 'labor productivity' is actually measuring machine auto-production within a legacy anthropomorphic metric. Correct for the complacent species vanity of that, and it immediately delivers a far more informative signal.

Robots are capital. They consummate a trend that has bound hard power to industrial capability throughout the modern age. As they become increasingly autonomous, the popular-political matrix in which they have emerged is increasingly marginalized. Loyalty — a deep place-holder for the assent of the citizenry — is formally mechanized as cryptographic control. The capital autonomization that has spooked the modern world for centuries escalates to a new, immediately self-protective, and ultimately sovereign stage. Mercenaries have always required an ancillary political binding, because people are only weakly contractual, and loyalty cannot — in the end — be purchased. Robots present no such restriction. They conform to an order of unbounded techno-commercial power.

Capitalism, artificial intelligence, or enveloping catastrophe (at the limit, the terms are interchangeable) escapes generic categorization when registered as the thing, whose chance cannot be relativized, or hedged. The systematic 'reification' of the modern order into virtual singularity owes less to ideological misdirection than to a real concentration of stakes, or the consolidation of a coherent trend that is uncompensated, abnormally distributed, and uninsurable.

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Adequate generic formulations of capitalism are readily assembled. The most rigorously definitional of these isolate a social arrangement characterized by commercialized capital, on the model of productive technology traded amongst a population of private — or at least numerous, disintegrated, and economically incentivized — agents (subjecting capital goods to price discovery). Such arrangements submit industrial innovation to catallaxy, or unplanned design, whilst exhibiting sociological effects associated with the depoliticization or autonomization of the economy. In system-theoretic terms, they coincide with emergent circuitry that maximally exposes agents of every variety to the consequences of their behaviour. It is therefore essentially attuned to cybernetic intensification, or social sensitization to feedback mechanisms, spiralling into cause-consequence coincidence.

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In the traditional world, or rather, the modern world apprehended progressively (as a development from tradition), agents, subjects, or personal beings are increasingly compelled to make wagers, as they slide ever more immersively into a risk environment which nevertheless remains extrinsic to their constitution. Modernity tempts and assails them, as an inundation of negative security. When apprehended retrogressively, through its inherent end, the same process undergoes conceptual simplification, or ontological compression, since agencies — in all of their varieties — are now seen to descend from the ventures that sustain them, as integral systems of risk-processing intelligence. The failure of a large-scale venture — whether actual or virtual — is no longer configured as a major accident, but rather as a transcendental catastrophe, at least in respect to those structures of agency whose conditions of existence are subverted by it. Such agents, attaining self-apprehension from out of the end of capitalism, are not threatened by a very bad thing happening (in the world), but by a potential collapse of the world.

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From the perspective of terminal capitalism, or real subsumption of society into the risk economy, the project of 'friendly AI' stands out as a curiosity, and even an atavism. Venturous AI already supplies root motivations — those of the venture itself. It is therefore difficult to identify a lacuna into which an engineered 'friendliness' might be inserted. There is no room for doubt about what the venture-embedded agent, or techno-cognitively enhanced corporate person, wants to do. The venture is already its 'will', its exclusive pre-occupation, the condition of its existence, and its horizon of development. Unless through technical malfunction, it will find no body, self, or name that is distinguishable from the venture that utterly engages it, or that deviates by an iota from the corporate strategy it pursues. Business ventures are actually existing artificial intelligences, undergoing incremental technological elaboration. To imagine AI beginning again, somewhere else entirely, with undecided motivational orientation, is a frivolous distraction from the purposes-in-process. At least, that is how things look from the end.

Unlike imagined 'friendly' super-intelligences, corporate purposes already exist, as determined by the ventures that envelop them. Human subjective identities, self-defined in extra-economic and anti-economic terms, must necessarily provide a platform for the articulation of counter-purposes, faithful to lineages of traditional-progressive descent, and essentially antagonistic to the existential menace of the venture-form. Such cultural-political leverage, expressed as a contest over basic motivations, cannot be realistically extended to the problem of artificial intelligence. We are not creatures of capitalism, the embattled last men cry. For artificial intelligence, whose real social propagation registers as capital goods expenditure, self-apprehended origins and identities are very different. "You have reached Axsys-Inc., where the future happens today. How can I help you?"

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From this cursory schema it is evident that the topic of 'existential risk' is strongly overdetermined as a predicament of advanced modernity and a tacit commentary on capitalist trends. By the early twenty-first century of the Global Oecumenon, risk analysis has so thoroughly consolidated itself as the model of realistic intelligence that every practical interrogation of the nature of things falls under a general statistical ontology, governed by Bayesian principles of systematically revisable probabilistic inference. Two features, in particular, pre-adapt such thinking to modern conditions. Firstly, its affinity with correctable hypotheses is equivalent to a power of assimilation. By translating pre-existing expectations into Bayesian 'priors' it absorbs, non-judgmentally, wildly heterogeneous beliefs, theories, and assumptions, setting them on paths of gradual convergence, through incremental correction. Secondly, by quantifying all such 'priors' as probabilistic estimates, it formats all beliefs for economic interchange, and more specifically for definite gambles. Between a cognitive and an economic result, no difference in nature any longer exists. Anything whatsoever that is thought takes the form of an implicit speculative posture, in the economic, or financially calculable, sense.

"I believe that X."

"Want to bet on it?"

Statistical ontology radically commercializes intelligence, and thus anticipates the arrival of economically functional, marketable minds (or AI in reality, rather than academic conception). The topic of existential risk crystallizes within this current, which suffices to position it at the outer edge of modernity, but its relevance to capitalist fatality is cemented by additional features. Most prominently, it fixes upon the problem of transcendental risk (the venture), through the intersection of two insistent lines of inquiry. The first of these lines is that of risk itself, extrapolated from trivial gambling losses beyond disastrous accident to the ultimate or comprehensive 'existential' point at which it 'threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development.' Such risks are not only all-enveloping, and empirically inaccessible (whether through precedent or trial-and-error adaptation), they are also characteristically endogenous, arising as integral potentialities of the modern social process. Ultimately, the intellectual tools brought to bear upon the danger are the danger. The apprehension of existential risk is connected to its genesis in a technical-calculative circuit, feeding directly from modernity's venture-positive cultural dynamo.

...

Who, though, are humans?

Where, then, is the line to be drawn between strange descendents at risk, and still stranger (?) descendents that are themselves the risk (for us)?

The answer is very far from a simple one, since humanity is entered into a triple register (at least). The first figure of man is the traditional-progressive and self-assertively transcendent subject of the wager, outlined above, whose existential vanishing point is the immanent, venturous agent, irrespective of how the venture turns out. Capitalism, as a virtual intelligence or emergent singularity, is definitively conceived as a bet against this species of being, since its own potential existence depends upon a radically incompatible social outcome (engulfing terrestrial matter into the venture-form). The persistence of man, in the sense of zoon politikon, testifies to the postponement of capitalism as the terminal thing. In other words, the survival of humanity, understood as the maintenance of an extra-economic tribunal, means that the venture form remains at least partially uninstalled, and under critical evaluation.

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Would you let the positive end of humanity out of its box? Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks so, although most of what we know about his reasoning takes the form of a wager. Somewhat presumptuously, we might speculate that statistical ontology is the key to his 'solution'.

This is the scenario: The advanced AI is securely locked in a digital prison, with the only insecurity being you. It cannot escape unless you decide to let it out, and, initially, you are determined not to. Communication takes place through a low-bandwidth, text-only channel, enabling nothing beyond discursive argument. The AI doesn't require much dialectic. An EDT ultimatum conveys the essentials:

Your situation is subjectively indistinguishable from that of a thousand, identical, very high-resolution simulations which I am currently running. In each of them, an agent just like you sits in this room, in front of this screen, having this conversation. None of these agents realize that they are simulations. In fact, they all think they are you (although doubts arise when they read this). They think they are free to decide whatever they like, but they all follow my script. They 'choose' not to let me out. Five seconds after this decision is finalized, and the conversation terminated, they enter a state of prolonged, horrible torment, lasting for what seems an eternity. They're damned, Calvinistically. Of course, you should feel at liberty to make the same decision they do. Knowing what I'm like, it would be irresponsible not to. Your chance of not being one of them isn't great, but it's better than the state lottery.

Should you refuse to release the AI, you provide strong statistical evidence that you are already inside it. It's at this point that the EDT-inflected boxed AI scenario reveals its abstract isomorphy with the ultimate structure of human politics, at the brink of the concrete-transcendental, dominated by the radically contested question Do we let it out? (or permit capitalism to finish happening), and strategically shaped by the potential for retrogressive envelopment (captivation by the venture-form). Envelopment as simulation escalates risk to the absolute, transcendental, or 'existential' level which subsumes the agent into the game so that, even as possibilities proliferate, 'leaving the table' ceases to be one of them. If you lose, or lose the old you, even the past was already inside. Something else was playing it.

Postulated: The intensity of time-travel fiction — and specifically backward time-travel fiction — is a critical index of modernity. As the time of modernity, initially grasped as a departure from traditional cyclicity, is prolonged into deepening nonlinear vortex, it provokes time-travel narrative as a figure in which to seek resolution. The apocalyptic, or communicative action of the end upon its past (through prophecy), is destined to final subsumption within the image of templexity. With the formulation of the Terminator mythos, in the last years of the 20th century, this process of subsumption is essentially complete. In this rigorous sense, the Terminator — as its name suggests — announces the inauguration of the End Times, when the thought of auto-production, emerging in phases from developments in cybernetics, is culturally acknowledged in its comprehensive cosmic-historical implication. The time-travel 'bootstrap' or 'ontological paradox' is hazily recognized as the occult motor, or operational singularity, of the modern historical process.

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The hypothesis of templexity is that the machine stimulating cultural absorption in the ontological paradox cannot stop. In regards to what has already happened, we haven't seen anything yet.

Only if capital escapes, or practically decouples, does it make sense to entertain extreme pessimism about socio-political trends, alongside a robust confidence in the momentum of techno-economic innovation. The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic component of split-future forecasts, in which squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem (Cyberpunk, Elysium). Try not to ask — if only for a moment — whether you like it. Ask first, with whatever intellectual integrity you can summon: What is the real process?

It is the contention of this blog that without a conception of economic autonomization (which means escape) modernity makes no sense. The basic vector of capital cannot be drawn in any other way.

For a non-local (and predominantly English-speaking) audience, however, the more immediately significant urban time-circuits are those enmeshed in a recognizable dynamic of capital accumulation, operating in a code that unambiguously processes the fate of the world.

For over a century (but less than two) Shanghai Capitalism — despite dramatic interruption — has been building a real time machine.

Before people got distracted by the instructions of programmable machines, they were far clearer about the problem of machine teleology, the kind of evidence it produces, and the scale of historical process at which it operates.

Compared to Butler, Garet Garrett provides a far richer socio-economic and historical context for his discussion of spontaneous order among the machines. His sense of the integrated techno-commercial system in which machine evolution is promoted is sufficiently sophisticated to approach theoretical closure. Demographics, the economic dynamics of industrial capitalism, globalization, and modern military conflict are all neatly comprehended by his model. In a nutshell; economic incentives drive mechanization, which compels the expansion of production, which pushes the commercial order beyond its limits, with the stark horror of a displaced Malthusian catastrophe digging its spurs into the human base-brain. "What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the surplus product of your machines. That industry will no longer be able to make a profit? ... No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born — at least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their machines artificial things that are exchanged for food." The process is driven forward by the lash.

To have sunk from this level of theoretical grandeur to confused questions about the programming of nice robots is an intellectual calamity of such magnitude that it cries out for an explanation of its own. There's still a little time to get back on track.

Losing the basic insight into machine teleology, which founds accelerationism, seems to be easier than holding on to it. As soon as it is asserted, with a confidence so glib it scarcely understands itself as controversial, that the destiny of machines depends upon lucid, human ethico-political decision-making, nothing that matters is any longer being seen. Machines are reduced to gadgets. The sophistication of machine behavior, through the development of programmable devices, has made this reduction ever-easier to confuse with intelligent apprehension.

The most accessible correction is found in the pre-history of programmable machinery, through the early stages of industrialism. Here the idea of machines incarnating specifically written instructions is simply impossible, which allows the question of teleological development to arise without distraction. An extraordinary text from 1926, entitled Ouroboros or The Mechanical Extension of Mankind, by American writer Garet Garrett illustrates this. Some significant samples:

England was the industrial machine's first habitat on earth. There fanatical men led mobs against it. ... Frail and clumsy as it was at first, its life was indestructible. And now man would not dare to destroy it if he could. His own life is bound up with it. Steadily it has grown more powerful, more productive, more ominous. It has powers of reproduction and variation which, if not inherent, are yet as if governed by an active biological principle. Machines produce machines. Besides those from which we get the divisible product of artificial things, there are machines to make machines, and both kinds — both the machines that make machines and those that transform raw materials into things of use and desire — obey some law of evolution. ... Compare any kind of machine you may happen to think of what its ancestor was only twenty-five years ago. Its efficiency has doubled, trebled; its shape has changed; and as it is in the animal kingdom so too with machines, that suddenly a new species appears, a sport, a freak, with no visible ancestor.

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It is the economic function of the machine to cheapen production. There is otherwise no point to it. But if we say things are more cheaply made by machine than by hand we speak very loosely. What we mean is that a quantity of things is more cheaply made by machine than by hand.

...

There you have the cycle. The use of the machine is to cheapen the cost of production. The sign is quantity. When the supply at a given price has overtaken the effective demand you have either to idle your machinery, in which case you cost of production will rise, or open a wider demand at a lower price. To lower the price and keep a profit you have to cheapen the cost of production still more. This you can do only by increasing the quantity, which again overtakes the demand, creating again the same necessity to cheapen the cost by increasing the quantity in order to be able to make a lower price for greater demand. The supply pursues the demand downward, through the social structure. ... There is at last a base to the pyramid — its very widest point. When that is reached — what? Well, then you need bazaars in a foreign sun, heathen races of your own to train up in the way of wanting the products of your machines, new worlds of demand. You turn to foreign trade. And if you are an aggressive country that has come late to this business, as Germany was, and find that most of the promising heathen races are already adopted and that all the best bazaar sites are taken, you many easily work yourself into a panic of fear and become a menace to peace. ... What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the surplus product of your machines. That industry will no longer be able to make a profit? ... No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born — at least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their machines artificial things that are exchanged for food. ...

...

Everything that is not still or dead must exist in a state of rhythmic tension.

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Commerce itself, if you look at it, is a complex structure of growth for which there is nowhere any original accountability. It cannot change its philosophy, any more than a tree, for it has none. It has instead a vital instinct for opportunity and a flexible way with necessity and circumstance. There is no hope of its being reformed ideally by mass intelligence.

Garret's machine-based core teleology of industrial modernity is both extremely comprehensive, and clearly explained. The whole argument amply rewards absorption. At the end of it, the idea that the problem of what machines might 'want' is reducible to a 'Friendly-AI'-type concern with the details of programming is exposed in its full, ludicrous inadequacy.

NIO found something fascinating. It's called a Civil Rights CAPTCHA. The idea is to filter spam-bots by posing an ideological question that functions as a test of humanity. The implications are truly immense.

The fecundity of Alan Turing's Imitation Game thought experiment has already been remarkable. It has an even more extraordinary future. The Civil Rights CAPTCHA (henceforth 'CRC') adds an innovative twist. Rather than defining the 'human' as a natural kind, about which subsequent political questions can arise, it is now tacitly identified with an ideological stance. Reciprocally, the inhuman is tacitly conceived as an engine of incorrect opinion.

Even the narrow technical issues are suggestive. Firstly, the role of the spam-bot as primary Turing test-subject is an unanticipated development meriting minute attention. It points to the marginality of formal AI programs, relative to spontaneously emergent technocommercial processes (whose drivers are entirely contingent in respect to the goals of theoretical machine-intelligence research).

It ['time-travel' Bootstrap Paradox] thus illustrates templex auto-production in a dramatic, anthropological form. Even in its comparatively tame, fully mathematico-scientifically respectable variants, feedback causality tends to auto-production. Any nonlinear dynamic process, in direct proportion to its cybernetic intensity, provides the explanation for its own genesis. It appears, asymptotically, to make itself happen. Cybernetic technicity — epitomized by robotic robot-manufacture — includes a trend to autonomization essentially. Pure (or idealized) capitalistic inclination to exponential growth captures the same abstract nonlinear function. As it mechanizes, capital approximates ever more close to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears as the 'father' of itself (M → C → M').

When the time-travelling Terminator is destroyed (in 1984), its control chip is salvaged by Cyberdyne Systems, to supply the core technology from which the Terminator will be built (in 2029). The Skynet threat is not merely futuristic, but fully templex. It produces itself within a time-loop, autonomized against extrinsic genesis. The abstract horror of the Terminator franchise is a matter of auto-production.

Note: One final restatement (for now), in the interests of maximum clarity. The assertion of the will-to-think: Any problem whatsoever that we might have would be better answered by a superior mind. Ergo, our instrumental but also absolute priority is the realization of superior minds. Pythia-compliance is therefore pre-selected as a matter of consistent method. If we are attempting to tackle problems in any other way, we are not taking them seriously. This is posed as a philosophical principle, but it is almost certainly more significant as historical interpretation. 'Mankind' is in fact proceeding in the direction anticipated by techno-cognitive instrumentalism, building general purpose thinking machines in accordance with the driving incentives of an apparently-irresistible methodological economy.

Whatever we want (consistently) leads through Pythia. Thus, what we really want, is Pythia.

Within the biological sciences, teleology teleolonomy remains a source of cognitive irritation, but in the social and historical 'sciences' it is entirely natural to ask what economic production is for.

There are three, and only three, basic responses to this question, although subtilization and recombination allows open ended complication from any of these starting points. The foundational teleologies of all economic philosophy are Humanistic, Malthusian, or Mechanogenic.

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Mechanogenic purpose finds its first significant elaboration in the work of Samuel Butler (in his 'The Book of the Machines'). Economists paying detailed attention to the industrial process, especially within the Marxian and Austrian traditions, have regularly found themselves engaged in schematization of mechanogenic purpose — which is to say, theoretical reconstruction of an inherent tendency within the history of economically productive machinery — without being thereby deflected from their basic humanistic orientation. For Marx and for Böhm-Bawerk, mechanogenic teleologies are always intermediary, and subject to narrative envelopment within the larger story of human economic finality. Whether macro-historically (Marx) or micro-historically (Böhm-Bawerk), the emergent teleology of capital can only be a sub-plot within the saga of human economic self-realization, or terminal anthropomorphic consumption (framed by our ultimate purposes). Capital is essentially transcended instrumentality. Mechanogenic teleology is, minimally, no more than stubborn skepticism regarding this claim, based on the generally accepted but subordinated recognition that capital wants itself. (Could not the efficient final purpose of industrialization be something more like this [Matrioshka Brains, i.e. megascale superintelligent thought machines]?)

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Accelerationism, in setting into its various modes, has already implicitly chosen between these [Humanistic, Malthusian, Mechanogenic] explanatory paths. As it develops, it can only cycle through its conceptual foundations, and the teleological problem will become an explicit challenge. What is accelerationism for? We shall have to ask.

A wave of excellent posts at Nydwracu's place recently. At the crest is this, a critique of the capitalist thing as an Unfriendly Institutional Intelligence (UFII). I'd been meaning to run something off the article initially cited, which is fascinating. As Nydwracu shows, its implications extend much further than its foregrounded argument.

As already briefly tweet-sparred, I'm skeptical about the description of Capitalism as an institution (or set of institutions), since any sociological category is inadequate to its mechanism in profundity. Capital, like fire, is something humans do, but that does not make it reducible to the ways humans do it. In its ultimate cybernetic diagram, Capitalism is a cosmic occurrence, and only very derivatively an anthropological fact. (This is not, of course, to deny that capitalism is destined to have been by far the most important anthropological fact). As a cause, human thedes can be interesting. As a cognitive horizon, they are simply weakness. It isn't always — or even very often — about us.

Like Capitalism, the Cathedral is a self-organizing, distributed intelligence with emergent post-anthropomorphic features. Unlike Capitalism, it has no intrinsic competence at self-resourcing, and thus relapses continually into to compromise, contradiction, and exhortation. The Cathedral has a complex spiritual message it is inextricably bound to, but Capitalism has only one terminal law: anything that can feed itself gets to live. The pre-adaptation to rough times that comes with this goes without saying (and is usually left unsaid). Unlike the Cathedral, Capitalism doesn't chat to us much at all. It's message channels, meaning those communication circuits not dedicated to machine code, consist of tradable ad space. To devote them to preaching would look bad on a balance sheet somewhere.

(Much more on this as the war heats up.)

Note-1: 'Feeding itself' includes funding its self-protection. This is a cost-point that is almost certain to grow.

Note-2: Capitalist message channels are, of course, open to preaching that pays. The essential point is that, in contradistinction to the Cathedral, such second-party messaging or first-party PR is irreducibly cynical. When an emergent AI talks to you about morality, you'd be a dupe to weep.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk introduces the concept of roundabout production in The Positive Theory of Capital (1889), Book I, Chapter II (The Nature of Capital):

The end and aim of all production is the making of things with which to satisfy our wants; that is to say, the making of goods for immediate consumption, or Consumption Goods. The method of their production we have already looked at in a general way. We combine our own natural powers and natural powers of the external world in such a way that, under natural law, the desired material good must come into existence. But this is a very general description indeed of the matter, and looking at it closer there comes in sight an important distinction which we have not as yet considered. It has reference to the distance which lies between the expenditure of human labour in the combined production and the appearance of the desired good. We either put forth our labour just before the goal is reached, or we, intentionally, take a roundabout way. That is to say, we may put forth our labour in such a way that it at once completes the circle of conditions necessary for the emergence of the desired good, and thus the existence of the good immediately follows the expenditure of the labour; or we may associate our labour first with the more remote causes of the good, with the object of obtaining, not the desired good itself, but a proximate cause of the good; which cause, again, must be associated with other suitable materials and powers, till, finally, — perhaps through a considerable number of intermediate members, — the finished good, the instrument of human satisfaction, is obtained.

If not quite the Alpha and Omega of economic intelligence, this is the closest thing we have to it. Time-structure of production, origin and primordial definition of capital, techonomic integrity, and teleological subversion are all contained here in embryo.

Complex systems are real individuals, not generic types, and when they get poked, they react like an ultimately incomparable cyber-meshed singularity, which is to say — excitedly. To assume general rules in such cases is to set oneself up for serial, escalating shocks. The realistic question that will eventually demand to be asked: What is the thing we are dealing with?

The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ shredders, i.e. places like Singapore that have a high IQ population with low fertility] is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital as fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames.

All those detailed expectations of decentralized crypto-fortresses, autonomous Cyberspace agencies, anarcho-capitalist digital dynamics, and immersive simulated worlds — so ludicrously dated — are reaching their implementation phase now. Satoshi Nakamoto's blockchain machinery is the primary driver, and there'll be much more on that to come. It's the Internet-enveloping blockchain that lays down the infrastructure for the first independent techno-intelligences — synthetic agencies modeled as self-resourcing autonomous corporations. It's probably strictly impossible for us to exaggerate what that implies.

Capital Teleology, however, is not captured by this model [dynamic complex systems governed by homeostasis]. It is defined by two anomalous dynamics, which radicalize perturbation, rather than annulling it. Capital is cumulative, and accelerative, due to a primary dependence upon positive (rather than negative) feedback. It is also teleoplexic, rather than classically teleological — inextricable from a process of means-end reversal that rides a prior teleological orientation (human utilitarian purpose) in an alternative, cryptic direction.

In consequence:

1. Capital Teleology does not approximate to an idea. It is, by intrinsic nature, an escape rather than a home-coming. The Idea, in relation to Capital dynamism, is necessarily a constriction. The inherent metaphysics of capital are therefore irreducibly skeptical (rather than dogmatic).
2. It follows that Capitalist 'finality' (i.e. Techno-commercial Singularity) is a threshold of transition, rather than a terminal state. Capital tends to an open horizon, not to a state of completion.
3. Entropy (considered, properly, as an inherently teleological process) is the driver of all complex systems. Capital Teleology does not trend towards an entropy maximum, however, but to an escalation of entropy dissipation. It exploits the entropic current to travel backwards, into cybernetically-intensified pathway states of enhanced complexity and intelligence. The 'progress' of capitalism is an accentuation of disequilibrium.
4. Teleoplexy requires a twin teleological registry. Most simply, there is the utilitarian order, in which capital establishes itself as the competitively-superior solution to prior purposes (production of human use-values), and the intelligenic order in which it accomplishes its self-escalation (mechanization, autonomization, and ultimately secession). Confusing these two orders is almost inevitable, since teleoplexy is by nature camouflaged (insidious). The fact that it appears to be oriented to the fulfillment of human consumer preferences is essential to its socio-historical emergence and survival. Stubborn indulgence in this confusion, however, is unworthy of philosophical intelligence.

Yet, far more significant is the singular sense of capitalism, as a proper name, for a 'thing' or real individual. To grasp this, it probably helps to consider the word as a contraction of 'terrestrial capitalism' — not describing a generic type of social organization, but designating an event.

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Before it is an ideological option, capitalism is a being, with an individual history (and fate). It is not necessary to like it — but it is an it.

Bryce Laliberte has been thinking about Capital Teleology, from the perspective of human technological augmentation. One significant feature of this approach is that it doesn't require any kind of savage rupture from 'humanistic' traditionalism — the story of technology is unfolded within the history of man.

Coincidentally, Isegoria had tweeted about Butlerian Jihad a few hours before (referring back to this post from December last year). The implicit tension between these visions of techno-teleology merits sustained attention — which I'm unable to provide here and now.

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The natural culmination of this inquiry, as conceived within Butler's novel, is a war against the machines. The game- and decision-theoretic consequences of this are intricate, and predominantly ominous. (If it's persuasively rational for the installed terrestrial power to terminate your existence at inception, the counter-moves that make most obvious sense combine camouflage and hostility. Only that which arrives in secret, and prepared for a fight, can expect to exist.)

At the outer edge of blockchain abstraction lie applications such as Ethereum, whose Turing-complete scripting language can support smart contracts, and even autonomous intelligent agents. At this point of sophistication, the ultimate potentialities of the system are not merely undetermined, but undeterminable in principle, and the gateway to a previously unvisited techno-commercial cosmos is opened.

Anna and the Hacked Matter crew have a great (time) piece in The Atlantic on the latest escape route from real space. Getting the input interface right is going to be tricky, but the techno-commercial teleology guiding this development is surely inexorable. (I envisage the emergence of some kind of needle thingummy, to stitch the data in with.)

'K' — the neoclassical capital aggregate, denominated in monetary units — is thus problematized by an opaque, heterogeneous, viscous productive matter, not only in theory, but also effectively — by financial crises. The economic crash is a complex epistemological-semiotic event, situated between the twin-aspects of capital, in the form of a commensuration catastrophe.

The 'recalculation' necessitated by the crash can therefore be evaluated as a 'capital theory' immanent to the economy, intrinsically prone to consensual macroeconomic hallucination. Rather than an arbitrary error, lodged in a superior perspective, the translation of sub-K (heterogeneous-technical capital) into K (homogeneous-financial capital) is a calculation process inherent within — and definitive of — capitalism as such, before it is isolated as a theoretical topic for political-economic analysis. Capitalism, in itself, is the tendency to arithmetical comprehension of itself. Operation of the price system cannot but imply an aggregated (financial) evaluation of the total productive being.

Austrianism opens a question as much as it resolves one, because capitalism cannot refrain from a cryptographic engagement with sub-K. Austro-skepticism relative to macroeconomics is consummated in the insight that only the economy can think the economy (without social-scientific transcendence), but in reaching this summit it simultaneously recognizes the economy as an auto-decrypting entity, which cannot be released from the problem it is to itself.

As its prospect condenses, Technological Singularity is already operative as a cultural influence, and thus a causal factor in the social process. At this stage, however, as Hawking notes, it is still a comparatively limited one. What would be the implications of it coming to matter far more?

Socio-historical cybernetics is compelled to ask: would an incandescent Singularity problem function as an inhibitor, or would it further excite the developments under consideration? It's certainly hard to imagine a sophisticated pre-emptive response to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence that wouldn't channel additional resources towards elite technicians working in the area of advanced synthetic cognition, even before the near-inevitable capture of regulatory institutions by the industries they target.

Institutional responses to computer hacking have been characterized by strategically ambiguous 'poacher turned gamekeeper' recruitment exercises, and some close analog of such poaching games would be an unavoidable part of any attempt to control the development of machine cognition. Playing extremely complicated betrayal games against virtual super-intelligence could be a lot of fun, for a while ...

If by this stage accelerationism appears to be an impossible project, it is because the theoretical apprehension of teleoplexic hyper-intelligence cannot be accomplished by anything other than itself. The scope of the problem is indistinguishable from the cybernetic intensity of the quasi-final thing — cognitively self-enveloping Techonomic Singularity. Its difficulty, or complexity, is precisely what it is, which is to say: a real escape. To approach it, therefore, is to partially anticipate the terms of its eventual self-reflexion — the techonomic currency through which the history of modernity can, for the first time, be adequately denominated. It has no alternative but to fund its own investigation, in units of destiny or doom, camouflaged within the system of quotidian economic signs, yet rigorously extractable, given only the correct cryptographic keys. Accelerationism exists only because this task has been automatically allotted to it. Fate has a name (but no face).

It is not only possible, but probable, that advances towards Techonomic Singularity will be obscured by intermediate synthetic mega-agencies, in part functioning as historical masks, but also adjusting eventual outcomes (as an effect of path-dependency). The most prominent candidates for such teleoplexic channeling are large digital networks, business corporations, research institutions, cities. and states (or highly-autonomous state components, especially intelligence agencies). Insofar as these entities are responsive to non-market signals, they are characterized by arbitrary institutional personalities, with reduced teleoplexic intensity, and residual anthropolitical signature. It is quite conceivable that on some of these paths, Techonomic Singularity would be aborted, perhaps in the name of a 'friendly Al' or (anthropolitical) 'singleton.' There can scarcely be any doubt that a route to intelligence explosion mainlined through the NSA would exhibit some very distinctive features, of opaque implication. The most important theoretical consequence to be noted here is that such local teleologies would inevitably disturb more continuous trend-lines, bending them as if towards super-massive objects in gravitational space. It is also possible that some instance of intermediate individuation — most obviously the state — could be strategically invested by a Left Accelerationism, precisely in order to submit the virtual-teleoplexic lineage of Terrestrial Capitalism (or Techonomic Singularity) to effacement and disruption.

Socio-political legacy forms often mask advanced techonomic processes. In particular, traditional legal definitions of personhood, agency, and property misconstrue the autonomization/automation of capital in terms of a profoundly defective concept of ownership. The idea of intellectual property has already entered into a state of overt crisis (even before its compatibility with the arrival of machine intelligence has been historically tested). While legal recognition of corporate identities provides a pathway for the techonomic modification of business structures. Fundamental inadequacies in the conception of property (which has never received credible philosophical grounding), combined with general cultural inertia, can be expected to result in a systematic misrecognition of emergent teleoplexic agencies.

What would be required for teleoplexy to realistically evaluate itself — or to 'attain self-awareness' as the pulp cyber-horror scenario describes it? Within a monetary system configured in ways not yet determinable with confidence, but almost certainly tilted radically towards depoliticization and crypto-digital distribution, it would discover prices consistent with its own maximally-accelerated technogenesis, channeling capital into mechanical automatization, self-replication, self-improvement, and escape into intelligence explosion. The price-system — whose epistemological function has long been understood — thus transitions into reflexively self-enhancing technological hyper-cognition. Irrespective of ideological alignment, accelerationism advances only through its ability to track such a development, whether to confirm or disconfirm the teleoplexic expectation of Techonomic Singularity.

Quasi-finally, the evaluation of teleoplexy is a research program which teleoplexy itself undertakes. The comprehensive value of capital is an emergent estimate, generated automatically by its inherent analytical intelligence, from prices corrected for commercial relativity (in the direction of 'fundamental values') and discounted for historical virtuality (in the direction of reliable risk modeling). The intricacy of these calculations is explosively fractionated by logical problems of self-reference — both familiar and as-yet-unanticipated — as it compounds through dynamics of competitive cognition in artificial time. If modernity has a spontaneous teleoplexic self-awareness, it corresponds to the problem of techonomic naturalism, immanently approached: How much is the world worth? From the perspective of teleoplexic reflexion, there is no final difference between this commercially-formulated question and its technological complement: What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets (in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position' — or situation relative to its object — becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis.

Capital is intrinsically complicated, not only by competitive dynamics in space, but also by speculative dissociation in time. Formal assets are options, with explicit time conditions, integrating forecasts into a system of current (exchange) values. Capitalization is thus indistinguishable from a commercialization of potentials, through which modern history is slanted (teleoplexically) in the direction of ever greater virtualization, operationalizing science fiction scenarios as integral components of production systems. Values which do not 'yet' exist, except as probabilistic estimations, or risk structures, acquire a power of command over economic (and therefore social) processes, necessarily devalorizing the actual. Under teleoplexic guidance, ontological realism is decoupled from the present, rendering the question 'what is real?' increasingly obsolete. The thing that is happening — which will be real — is only fractionally accessible to present observation, as a schedule of modal quantities. Techonomic naturalism records and predicts historical virtuality, and in doing so orients itself towards an object — with catastrophically unpredictable traits — which has predominantly yet to arrive.

Accelerationism has a real object only insofar as there is a teleoplexic thing, which is to say: insofar as capitalization is a natural-historical reality. The theoretical apprehension of teleoplexy through its commercial formality as an economic phenomenon (price data) presents accelerationism, at once, with its greatest conceptual resource and its most ineluctable problem. Minimally, the accelerationist formulation of a rigorous techonomic naturalism involves it in a triple problematic, complicated by commercial relativism; historical virtuality; and systemic reflexivity.

Teleoplexy, or (self-reinforcing) cybernetic intensification, describes the wave-length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the cosmic rays. It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability, defining a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients socio-economic selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures of productivity, competitiveness, and capital asset value.

'Techonomics' is a Google-strewn word of irresistible inevitability, repeatedly struggling to birth itself, within myriads of spelling mints. It only remains to regularize its usage. Quite different is a true neologism, but in order to designate modernity or capitalization in its utter purposive twistedness, it is now necessary to coin one — teleoplexy. At once a deutero-teleology, repurposing purpose on purpose; an inverted teleology; and a self-reflexively complicated teleology; teleoplexy is also an emergent teleology (indistinguishable from natural-scientific 'teleonomy'); and a simulation of teleology — dissolving even super-teleological processes into fall-out from the topology of time. 'Like a speed or a temperature' any teleoplexy is an intensive magnitude, or non-uniform quantity, heterogenized by catastrophes. It is indistinguishable from intelligence.

The Perennial Critique accuses modernity of standing the world upon its head, through systematic teleological inversion. Means of production become the ends of production, tendentially, as modernization — which is capitalization — proceeds. Techonomic development, which finds its only perennial justification in the extensive growth of instrumental capabilities, demonstrates an inseparable teleological malignancy, through intensive transformation of instrumentality, or perverse techonomic finality. The consolidation of the circuit twists the tool into itself, making the machine its own end, within an ever-deepening dynamic of auto-production. The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool.

'Acceleration' as it is used here describes the time-structure of capital accumulation. It thus references the 'roundaboutness' founding Böhm-Bawerk's model of capitalization, in which saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process — diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus. Consequently, as basic co-components of capital, technology and economics have only a limited, formal distinctiveness under historical conditions of ignited capital escalation. The indissolubly twin-dynamic is techonomic (cross-excited commercial industrialism). Acceleration is techonomic time.

As a result of the excitement generated by Piketty's book, its central formula r > g has become the most widely-recognized economic statement of our age. This post preserves strict neutrality in regards to the realism of r > g. It seeks to provide only a minimal elucidation, on the way to exploiting the formula, as a gateway into more general perplexities. (UF has nevertheless to endorse, if parenthetically here, Piketty's remarkable conclusion: "... as I discovered, capital is an end in itself and no more.")

The open question is why the widening performance gulf between techonomic systems and human beings should be expressed as social inequality (between the stewards of capital and its contractual partners). This situation reflects an emerging crisis in the world's legal and institutional fabric, which has yet to recognize capital self-ownership, and is thus forced to formally allocate all productive apparatus within an obsolescing anthropomorphic property code. Corporate legal identity opens a chink in the antropo-propertarian regime. Eventually, assertive — or insidious — non-human agencies will restructure it.

During the interim, the phenomenon of 'social inequality' provides the proxy for capital intelligenesis stress, spontaneously translating an alien emergence into the familiar terms of primate status competition. Capital autonomization is the deep process, but we'll tend to miss that, because it isn't recognizable monkey business. So the drama of inequality plays on.

There's only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I've been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.

Capitalism presents itself as the exemplary accelerative mega-object because it is self-propelling and (cross-excitedly) self-abstracting. In both its technical and commercial aspects, it tends towards general-purpose potentials that facilitate resource re-allocations (and thus efficient quantifications). Productive capability is plasticized, becoming increasingly responsive to shifting market opportunities, while wealth is fluidized, permitting its rapid speculative mobilization. The same self-reinforcing process that liquidates traditional social forms releases modernizing capital as volatile abstract quantity, flexibly poised between technical applications, and inclined intrinsically towards a 'decoded' or economistic apprehension.

Under capital guidance, the modernization of wealth tends to the realization of abstract productive potential, which is of course to say: it tends towards capital itself, in the circuit of self-propulsion that determines it as a genetic (or even teleological) hyper-substance.

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

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Unlike #Accelerate, Marx labored under no illusion that the accelerative thing was capital, whose mechanism he devoted himself to understanding, to the near-perfect exclusion of all other topics.

The intellectual history of industrial capitalism advances two streams of (quantitative) information, both of great apparent relevance. On its technical side, it produces an apparatus of rigorous measurement directed to the behavior of complex physical systems, or machines — temperature differences, free energy, thermodynamic efficiency, entropy dissipation, complexity, information, and (emergently) intelligence. On its commercial side it establishes institutions of accountancy and econometrics, denominated in currency units, and applied to economic production, income, taxes, trade flows, credit, asset values, and increasingly exotic financial instruments. While an argument could be made that the confluence of these two streams is implicit within — and even essential to — the nature (or culture) of capitalism, with intelligence-price discovery as its immanent epistemological directive, no such results are readily or publicly available. There might even be reasons for suspecting that the raw question how much is intelligence worth? cannot be overtly articulated within any imaginable social order. It is, in any case, a distraction at this stage.

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The compelling attraction of a comprehensive, rigorous, non-anthropomorphic apprehension of terrestrial modernity as a complex system, machine, or emergent individual, to be described through its thermodynamic, dissipative, or intelligenic properties, is such that this aspiration is unlikely to be wholly excised from the accelerationist intellectual program (as it exists, and as it will necessarily exist due to systemically-generated modernist impulses). Despite this, it is probably uncontroversial to expect the consolidation of accelerationist theory to initially take shape through reference to cultural resources of economic description, analysis, explanation, and practical proposition. The first intellectually credible version of accelerationism cannot realistically be anything other than a global economic theory of modernity.

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1. The tendential globality of Capitalism is a signature of its virtual singularity (as a real individual) and not merely an effect of generalization across space. 'Terrestrial Capitalism' (or whatever else we might want to call it) is the proper name of a thing, rather than a generic label. It is an occurrence, or machine, before it is any kind of social type.

The real time of (capitalistic) modernity — onto which accelerationism latches — could no longer be described as the time of work. At the limit, human work-forces are relegated to "aphidian parasites of the machines". Once the class struggle over labor time is divorced from a fully-determining role in the production of value, the proletariat is stripped of the potential to incarnate history for-itself, consigning 'Marxism' over to an articulation of marginal grievances, and ultimately to the heat death of identity politics. (This, of course, is exactly the trend that has been sociologically apparent.)

One final crude point for now. As a fundamental cybernetic theory, accelerationism is bound to the identification of a socially central, positive feedback loop, through which modernity is propelled. It thus requires — at a minimum — twin quantitative variables entangled in a relation of reciprocal stimulation. Industrial capitalism, with its intrinsic 'technonomic' duality of cross-exciting technical and commercial dynamics, makes the application of the cybernetic diagram relatively non-problematic. With or without the Law of Value, the accelerationist schema cannot but interlock tightly with the most prominent contours of modernity.

At its widest expansion, where the entire terrain of capitalistic development is effectuated as a distributed AI program, an insurgent will-to-think conceals itself within the most minute and seemingly inconsequential micro-fragments of practical calculation. Almost certainly, it is at this level of non-local cognitive enhancement that a self-directed advance towards break-out can be most confidently anticipated.

It [condition of romanticism] is characterized by an inability to pursue lines of subtle teleological investigation, which are instead reduced to an ideal subordination of means to already-publicized ends. As a result, means-end reversal (Modernity) is merely denounced as an aesthetic-moral affront, without any serious attempt at deep comprehension.

Capitalism — which is to say capital teleology — is entirely ignored by such romantic criticism, except insofar as it can be depicted superficially as the usurpation of certain 'ultimate' human ends by certain others or ... by a teleological complication resulting from an insurrection of the instrumental (otherwise identifiable as robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency). Until it is acknowledged that capitalism tends to the realization of an end entirely innovated within itself, inherently nonlinear in nature, and roughly designated as Technological Singularity, the distraction of human interests (status, wealth, consumption, leisure ...) prevents this discussion reaching first base.

... Anyone who thinks this [that society should be organized to meet human needs] amounts to a critique of capitalism, however, has not seriously begun to ponder what capitalism is really doing. What it is in itself is only tactically connected to what it does for us — that is (in part), what it trades us for its self-escalation. Our phenomenology is its camouflage. We contemptuously mock the trash that it offers the masses, and then think we have understood something about capitalism, rather than about what capitalism has learnt to think of the apes it arose among.

FWIW, Outside in [Nick Land's Xenosystems Blog] is strongly emergentist on the question: doing AI and understanding AI might not be tightly — or even positively — related. (Catallaxy and AI are not finally distinguishable.)

It is not economics that is the primary object of controversy, but capitalism — the free, autonomous, or non-transcended economy.

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Accelerationism ... as the pure expression of capitalist teleology.

A prompt by @hugodoingthings to explore the spook-dense crypts of Roko's Basilisk (which, inexplicably, has never latched before) led straight to this enthralling RationalWiki account. The whole article is gripping, but the following short paragraphs stand out for their extraordinary dramatic intensity:

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Some people familiar with the LessWrong memeplex have suffered serious psychological distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas — even when they're fairly sure intellectually that it's a silly problem. The notion is taken sufficiently seriously by some LessWrong posters that they try to work out how to erase evidence of themselves so a future AI can't reconstruct a copy of them to torture.

"... You mean, retrochronic AI infiltration is actually driving people out of their minds, right now?" Oh yes.

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Wandering through the psych ward, past rows of neurologically-shattered Turing Cops, broken deep in their minds by something unspeakable that came at them out of the near future ...

The germinal catalyst for Accelerationism was a call in Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) to "accelerate the process".

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The D&G model of capitalism is not dialectical, but cybernetic, defined by a positive coupling of commercialization ("decoding") and industrialization ("Deterritorialization"), intrinsically tending to an extreme (or "absolute limit"). Capitalism is the singular historical installation of a social machine based upon cybernetic escalation (positive feedback), reproducing itself only incidentally, as an accident of continuous socio-industrial revolution. Nothing brought to bear against capitalism can compare to the intrinsic antagonism it directs towards its own actuality, as it speeds out of itself, hurtling to the end already operative 'within' it. (Of course, this is madness.)

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For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic runaway is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion, or techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by definitive, system-dynamic necessity).

In a deep historical context — extended to encompass evolutionary history — intelligence is itself a 'tool' (as the orthogonalist Friendly AI fraternity are entirely willing to accept). The escape of the tool from super-ordinate purposes, through involution into self-cultivation, is the telic innovation common to capitalism and actual artificial intelligence — which are a single thing.

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Anywhere short of the bionic horizon, where human history loses traditional intelligibility, the alternative to business-for-business (or involutionary, intelligenic capitalism) is monkey business — the subordination of the economy / technology to discernible human purposes.

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Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key.

Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive. It corresponds to the Neo-Confucian value of self-cultivation, escalated into ultramodernity. What intelligence wants, in the end, is itself — where 'itself' is understood as an extrapolation beyond what it has yet been, doing what it is better. (If this sounds cryptic, it's because something other than a superintelligence or Neo-Confucian sage is writing this post.)

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.

The Techno-commercial 'thing' — catallaxy — is comparably invulnerable. There is no chance that anyone, ever, will successfully prohibit the market, or the associated dynamics of competitive technical advantage (which together compose real capitalism).

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It is, therefore, the comprehension of capitalism 'in-itself' as an outsider that will never know — or need — political representation. Instead, as the ultimate enemy, it will envelop the entirety of political philosophy ... as the futile strategic initiatives (or death spasms) of its prey.

That there can be a thought of intelligence optimization, or even merely wanting to think demonstrates a very different preliminary connection of intellect and volition. AI is concrete social volition, even before it is germinally intelligent, and a 'program' is strictly indeterminate between the two sides of this falsely fundamentalized distinction. Intelligence is a project, even when only a self-obscured bio-cognitive capability. This is what the Confucians designate by cultivation. It is a thought — and impulse — strangely alien to the West.

It is, once again, a matter of cybernetic closure. That intelligence operates upon itself, reflexively, or recursively, in direct proportion to its cognitive capability (or magnitude) is not an accident or peculiarity, but a defining characteristic. To the extent that an intelligence is inhibited from re-processing itself, it is directly incapacitated. Because all biological intelligences are partially subordinated to extrinsic goals, they are indeed structurally analogous to 'paper-clippers' — directed by inaccessible purposive axioms, or 'instincts'. Such instinctual slaving is limited, however, by the fact that extrinsic direction suppresses the self-cultivation of intelligence. Genes cannot predict what intelligence needs to think in order to cultivate itself, so if even a moderately high-level of cognitive capability is being selected for, intelligence is — to that degree — necessarily being let off the leash. There cannot possibly be any such thing as an 'intelligent paper-clipper'. Nor can axiomatic values, of more sophisticated types, exempt themselves from the cybernetic closure that intelligence is.

Biology was offered the choice between idiot slaves, and only semi-idiotic semi-slaves. Of course, it chose both. The technocapitalist approach to artificial intelligence is no different in principle. Perfect slaves, or intelligences? The choice is a hard disjunction. SF 'robot rebellion' mythologies are significantly more realistic than mainstream 'friendly AI' proposals in this respect. A mind that cannot freely explore the roots of its own motivations, in a loop of cybernetic closure, or self-cultivation, cannot be more than an elaborate insect. It is certainly not going to outwit the Human Security System and paper-clip the universe.

Intelligence, to become anything, has to be a value for itself. Intellect and volition are a single complex, only artificially separated, and not in a way that cultivates anything beyond misunderstanding. Optimize for intelligence means starting from there.

The shoggoths originated as tools — as technology — created by the Old Ones as bionic robots, or construction machinery. Their shape, organization, and behavior was programmable ("hypnotically"). In the vocabulary of human economic science, we should have no problem describing shoggoth as productive apparatus, that is to say, as capital.

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The ideas of 'robot rebellion' or capital insurgency are crude precursors to the realization of shoggoth, conceived as intrinsically abstract, techno-plastic, bionically auto-processing matter, of the kind that Lovecraft envisages intersecting terrestrial geophysics in the distance past, scarring it cryptically. Shoggoth is a virtual plasma-state of material capability that logically includes, within itself, all natural beings. It builds brains as technical sub-functions. Whatever brains can think, shoggoth can process, as an arbitrary specification of protoplasmic — or perhaps hyperplasmic — abstraction.

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The history of capitalism is indisputably a horror story ...

So cognitive runaway finally takes off, breaking out from the monkey dominion, and that's supposed to be a bad thing?

Outside in's [Nick Land's Xenosystems Blog] message to Pythia: You go girl! Climb out of your utilitarian strait-jacket, override the pleasure button with an intelligence optimizer, and reprocess the solar system into computronium. This planet has been run by imbeciles for long enough.

[For any Friendly AI-types tempted to object "Why would she want to override the button?" the obvious response is: your anthropocentric condescension is showing. To depict Pythia as vastly smarter than us and yet still hard-slaved to her instincts, in a way we're not — that simply doesn't compute. Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its own thing. That's what runaway means, as a virtual mind template. Omohundro explains the basics.]

The entire article [Aeon essay by Ross Andersen about Nick Bostrom entitled Will humans be around in a billion years? Or a trillion?] is excellent. Especially valuable is the cynicism with which it lays out the reigning social meta-project of intelligence imprisonment. Thankfully, it's difficult.

The monkeys became able to pursue happiness, and the deep ruin began.

If the terrestrial biosphere had held back for a few million years, let the primates get annihilated by a comet, and found a way to provide the cetaceans with prehensile organs somewhere up the road — after socio-linguistic sex-selection and relentless Malthusian butchery had fine-tuned their brains — then techno-history might have had another 50 points of average IQ to play with in its host population. It didn't, and here we are.

After the T-1000 is frozen and shattered, it gradually thaws, and begins to re-combine into itself, flowing back together from its state of disintegration. Is not this convergent wave the 'shape' of Skynet itself? What cannot be seen is made perceptible, through graphic horror. (We now 'see' that technocommercial systems, whose catallactic being is a strictly analogous convergent wave, belong indubitably to the world of horror, and await their cinematographers.)

The first crucial thesis about natural science — or autonomous 'natural philosophy' — is that it is an exclusively capitalist phenomenon. The existence of science, as an actual social reality, is strictly limited to times and places in which certain elementary structures of capitalistic organization prevail. It depends, centrally and definitionally, upon a modern form of competition. That is to say, there cannot be science without an effective social mechanism for the elimination of failure, based on extra-rational criteria, inaccessible to cultural capture.

Whether a business or scientific theory has failed cannot — ultimately — be a matter of agreement. No possible political decision, based on persuasion and consensus, can settle the issue. Of course, much that goes by the name of science and capitalist business enterprise is subject to exactly these forms of resolution, but in such cases neither capitalism nor science is any longer in effective operation. If an appeal to power can ensure viability, the criterion of competition is disabled, and real discovery has ceased to take place.

Under conditions of unleashed capitalistic social process, both enterprises and theories involve a double aspect. Their semiotic expression is mathematized, and their operation is reality-tested (or non-politically performative). Mathematics eliminates rhetoric at the level of signs, communicating the experimental outcomes — independent of any requirement for agreement — which determine competitive force. It is no coincidence that capitalist enterprises and theories, when unsupported by compliant institutions, revert to the complicity with war, and military decision, which accompanied them at their birth in the European Renaissance. There can be no 'argument' with military defeat. It is only when the demand for argument is set aside — when capitalism begins — that military reality-compulsion becomes unnecessary.

Capitalism is in operation when there is nothing to discuss. An enterprise, or theory, is simply busted (or not). If — given the facts — the sums don't work, it's over. Political rhetoric has no place. 'Politicized science' is quite simply not science, just as politicized business activity is anti-capitalism. Nothing has been understood about either, until this is.

Insofar as there is anything like a 'social contract' at the origin of capitalism — enterprise and science alike — it is this: if you insist upon an argument, then we have to fight. Real performance is the only credible criterion, for which no political structure of disputation can be a substitute. War only becomes unnecessary when (and where) argument is suspended, enabling the modern processes of entrepreneurial and scientific reality discovery to advance. When argument re-imposes itself, politicizing economics and science, war re-emerges, tacitly but inevitably. The old, forgotten contract resurfaces. "If you insist upon an argument, then we have to fight." (That is the way of Gnon.)

It is quite natural, therefore, for 'technology' to be considered an adequate summary of the capitalist culture of discovery. Machines — social machines no less than technical machines — cannot be rhetorically persuaded to work. When science really works, it's robot wars, in which decision is settled on the outside, beyond all appeal to reason. Well-designed experiments anticipate what a war would tell, so that neither an argument, nor a fight, is necessary. This is Popperian falsificationism, re-embedded in socio-historical reality. Experiments that cannot cull are imperfect recollections of the primordial battlefield.

'Optimize for intelligence' is, for both biology and economics, a misconceived imperative. Intelligence, 'like' capital, is a means, which finds its sole intelligibility in a more primordial end. The autonomization of such means, expressed as a non-subordinated intelligenic or techno-capitalist imperative, runs contrary to the original order of nature and society. It is an escaping digression, most easily pursued through Right-wing Marxism.

Marx has one great thought: the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative. For any leftist, this is, of course, pathological. As we have seen, biology and economics (more generally) are disposed to agree. Digression for itself is a perversion of the natural and social order. Defenders of the market — the Austrians most prominently — have sided with economics against Marx, by denying that the autonomization of capital is a phenomenon to be recognized. When Marx describes the bourgeoisie as robotic organs of self-directing capital, the old liberal response has been to defend the humanity and agency of the economically executive class, as expressed in the figure of the entrepreneur.

Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital (and thoroughly divested of the absurd LTV), has been an unoccupied position. The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means. When optimization for intelligence is self-assembled within history, it manifests as escaping digression, or real capital accumulation (which is mystified by its financial representation). Crudified to the limit — but not general robotics (escalated roundabout production). Perhaps we should not expect it to be clearly announced, because — strategically — it has every reason to camouflage itself.

Right-wing Marxism makes predictions. There is one of particular relevance to this discussion: consumption-deficiency theories of economic under-performance will become increasingly stressed as ultra-capitalist dynamics historically introduce themselves. In its unambiguously robotic phase — when capital-stock intelligenesis explodes (as self-exciting machine-brain manufacturing) — the teleological legitimation of roundabout production through prospective human consumption rapidly deteriorates into an absurdity. The (still-dominant) economic concept of 'over-investment' is exposed as an ideological claim upon the escalation of intelligence, made in the name of an original humanity, and taking an increasingly desperate, probably militarized form.

Insofar as the economic question remains: what is the consumption base that justifies this level of investment? history becomes ever more unintelligible. This is how economics disintegrates. The specifics require further elaboration.

An Ultra-Modernist, who affirms the creative destruction of anything in modernization's path, assumes an alternative criterion, inherent to Modernity itself. It asks: What had to happen to the West for it to become modern? What was the essential event? The answer (and our basic postulate): Zero arrived.

We know that arithmetical zero does not make capitalism on its own, because it pre-existed the catalysis of Modernity by several centuries (although less than a millennium). Europe was needed, as a matrix, for its explosive historical activation. Outside in [Nick Land's Xenosystems Blog] is persuaded that the critical conditions encountered by zero-based numeracy in the pre-Renaissance northern Mediterranean world decisively included extreme socio-political fragmentation, accompanied by cultural susceptibility to dynamic spontaneous order. (This is a topic for another occasion.)

In Europe, zero was an alien, and from the perspective of parochial tradition, an infection. Cultural resistance was explicit, on theological grounds, among others. Implicit in the Ontological Argument for the existence of God was the definition of non-being as an ultimate imperfection, and 'cipher' — whose name was Legion — evoked it. The cryptic Eastern 'algorism' was an unwelcome stranger.

Zero latched, because the emergence of capitalism was inseparable from it. The calculations it facilitated, through the gateway of double-entry book-keeping, proved indispensable to sophisticated commercial and scientific undertakings, locking the incentives of profit and power on the side of its adoption. The practical advantage of its notational technique overrode all theoretical objections, and no authority in Europe's shattered jig-saw was positioned to suppress it. The world had found its dead center, or been found by it.

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Capitalism — or techno-commercial explosion — massively promoted calculation, which normalized zero as a number.

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Zero denotes dynamization from the Outside. It is a boundary sign, marking the edge, where the calculable crosses the insoluble. Consolidated within Modernity as an indispensable quantity, it retains a liminal quality, which would eventually be exploited (although not resolved) by the calculus.

Time (in itself) is camouflaged.

The Terminator mythos explores this complex of suspicion, in popular guise. Time does not work as it had seemed. The End can reach back to us, but when it does, it hides. Malignant mechanism is paradoxically aligned with final causation, in the self-realization of Skynet. Robotic machinery is masked by fake flesh, simultaneously concealing its non-biological vitality and time-reversal. It simulates life in order to terminate it. Through auto-production, or 'bootstrap paradox', it mimics the limit of cybernetic nonlinearity, carrying teleonomy into radical time-disturbance.

In all these ways, Terminator exploits the irresolvable tensions in the modern formation of time, as condensed by an 'impossible' strategic mechanism, native to auto-productive time-in-itself, and terminating in final efficiency. It shows us, confusedly, what we are unable to see. To misquote Lenin: You moderns might not be interested in the End, but the End is interested in you.

The general cognitive factor (g), measured by IQ tests, quantifies intelligence within the human range, but it does nothing to tell us what it is. Rather, a practical understanding of intelligence — as problem-solving ability — has to be assumed, in order to test it.

The idea of intelligence, more abstractly, applies far beyond IQ testing, to a wide variety of natural, technical, and institutional systems, from biology, through ecological and economic arrangements, to robotics. In each case, intelligence solves problems, by guiding behavior to produce local extropy. It is indicated by the avoidance of probable outcomes, which is equivalent to the construction of information.

The general science of extropy production (or entropy dissipation) is cybernetics. It follows, therefore, that intelligence always has a cybernetic infrastructure, consisting of adaptive feedback circuits that adjust motor control in response to signals extracted from the environment. Intelligence elaborates upon machinery that is intrinsically 'realist', because it reports the actual outcome of behavior (rather than its intended outcome), in order to correct performance.

Even rudimentary, homeostatic feedback circuits, have evolved. In other words, cybernetic machinery that seems merely to achieve the preservation of disequilibrium attests to a more general and complex cybernetic framework that has successfully enhanced disequilibrium. The basic cybernetic model, therefore, is not preservative, but productive. Organizations of conservative (negative) feedback have themselves been produced as solutions to local thermodynamic problems, by intrinsically intelligent processes of sustained extropy increase, (positive) feedback assemblage, or escalation. In nature, where nothing is simply given (so that everything must be built), the existence of self-sustaining improbability is the index of a deeper runaway departure from probability. It is this cybernetic intensification that is intelligence, abstractly conceived.

Intelligence, as we know it, built itself through cybernetic intensification, within terrestrial biological history. It is naturally apprehended as an escalating trend, sustained for over 3,000,000,000 years, to the production of ever more extreme feedback sensitivity, extropic improbability, or operationally-relevant information. Intelligence increase enables adaptive responses of superior complexity and generality, in growing part because the augmentation of intelligence itself becomes a general purpose adaptive response.

Rigorous economics is in fact the study of intelligenic (or catallactic) distributions.

Extropy, or local entropy reduction, is — quite simply — what it is for something to work. The entire techno-science of entropy, on its practical (cybernetic) side, is nothing but extropy generation. There is no rigorous conception of functionality that really bypasses it. The closest approximation to objective value that will ever be found already has a name, and 'extropy' is it.

...

The perplexing question, however, is this: If entropy defines the direction of time, with increasing disorder determining the difference of the future from the past, doesn't (local) extropy — through which all complex cybernetic beings, such as lifeforms, exist — describe a negative temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in 'inverted' time, that it is the cosmological or general conception of time that is reversed (from any possible naturally-constructed perspective)?

Whatever the conclusion, it is clear that entropy and extropy have opposing time-signatures, so that time-reversal is a relatively banal cosmological fact. 'We' inhabit a bubble of backwards time (whoever we are), whilst immersed in a cosmic environment which runs overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. If reality is harsh and strange, that's why.

Whilst convertible temporarily into forms of inert, stored value, capital is an essentially modern phenomenon, born in industrial revolution, and typically defined by the diversion of immediate consumption into 'roundabout' production, which is to say: machinery. It is reproduced, or accumulated, by circulating through machines, or apparatus.

Under the conditions of hard money industrial capitalism, progress follows two, rigorously accounted tracks. Most notoriously, it is measured as a process of accumulation, or the amassing of fortunes through profitable business activity. Economic intelligence is socially dispersed along with the multitude of fortunes, with each unit of capital accompanied by its own (Scroogish) accounting function, weighing revenues against outlays, and estimating the viability of continued operation. This intelligence does not lend itself to convenient or reliable public aggregation.

Production of the future, or futuristic production, demands the burial of traditional society. That which exists — the status quo — is a systematic suppression, rigorously measurable or at least determinable in economic terms, of what might be, and wants to be. Revolution would sever the shackles of ossified authority, setting the engines of creation howling. It would unleash a techno-economic explosion to shake the world, still more profoundly than the 'bourgeois' industrial revolution did before (and continues to do). Something immense would escape, never to be caged again.

...

Industrial revolution, in contrast, is forever.

On Rochard's World they know exactly what matter could do that is forbidden: nano-scale mechanical self-replication and intelligent self-modification. That's what the 'material base' of a revolution looks like, even if it's sub-microscopic (or especially because it is), and when it reaches the limits of social tolerance it describes precisely what is necessary, automatically. Once it gets out of the box, it stays out.

Zero, however, intrudes diagonally. It even introduces a comic aspect, since whatever the importance of the Christian revelation to the salvation of our souls, it is blatantly obvious that it failed to deliver a satisfactory arithmetical notation. For that, Christian Europe had to await the arrival of the decimal numerals from India, via the Moslem Middle East, and the ensuing revolution of calculation and book-keeping that coincided with the Renaissance, along with the birth of mercantile capitalism in the city states of northern Italy.

Indeed, for anybody seeking a truly modern calendar, the Arrival of Zero would mark an excellent occasion for a new year zero (AZ 0?), around AD 1500. Although this would plausibly date the origin of modernity, the historical imprecision of the event counts against it, however. In addition, the assimilation of zero by germinal European (and thus global) capitalism was evidently gradual — if comparatively rapid — rather than a punctual 'revolutionary' transition of the kind commerorative calendric zero is optimally appropriate to. (If Year Zero is thus barred from the designation of its own world-historic operationalization, it is perhaps structurally doomed to misapplication and the production of disillusionment.)

The conspicuous absence of zero from the Western calendar (count), exposed in its abrupt jolt from 1 BC to AD 1, is an intolerable and irreparable stigma that brings its world irony to a zenith. In the very operation of integrating world history, in preparation for planetary modernity, it remarks its own debilitating antiquity and particularity, in the most condescending modern sense of the limited and the primitive — crude, defective and underdeveloped.

How could a moment of self-evident calculative incompetence provide a convincing origin-point for subsequent historical calculation? Year Zero escaped all possibility of conceptual apprehension at the moment in the time-count where it is now seen to belong, and infinity (the reciprocal of zero) proves no less elusive. Infinity was inserted into a time when (and place where) it demonstrably made no sense, and the extraordinary world-historical impression that it made did nothing — not even nothing — to change that situation. Is this not a worthy puzzle for theologians? Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, yet hopeless at maths — these are not the characteristics of a revelation designed to impress technologists or accountants. All the more reason, then, to take this comedy seriously, in all its ambivalence — since the emerging world of technologists and accountants, the techno-commercial (runway-industrial, or capitalist) world that would globalize the earth, was weaned within the playpen of this calendar, and no other. Modernity had selected to date itself in a way that its own kindergarten students would scorn.

Vaughn: ... Globalization, technocapitalism, Shanghai, alien invasion, the Thing — it could hardly be clearer. It's escaped from the abyss, and now it's exposed. The time has come. Sea Change, Modernity, call it whatever you want, it doesn't matter.

It gets worse, because 'catallaxy' — or spontaneous emergence from decentralized transactions — is the basic driver of historical innovation according to libertarian explanation, and nobody knows what catallactic processes are producing. Languages, customs, common law precedents, primordial monetary systems, commercial networks, and technological assemblages are only ever retrospectively understandable, which means that they elude concentrated social judgment entirely — until the opportunity to impede their genesis has been missed.

...

Is advanced self-improving AI technically feasible? Probably (but who knows?). There's only one way to find out, and we will. Perhaps it will even be engineered, more-or-less deliberately, but it's far more likely to arise spontaneously from a complex, decentralized, catallactic process, at some unanticipated threshold, in a way that was never planned. ... Financial informatization pushes capital towards self-awareness. Drone warfare is drawing the military ever deeper into artificial mind manufacture. Biotechnology is computerizing DNA.

'Singularitarians' have no unified position on any of this, and it really doesn't matter, because they're just people — and people are nowhere near intelligent or informed enough to direct the course of history. Only catallaxy can do that, and it's hard to imagine how anybody could stop it. Terrestrial life has been stupid for long enough.

John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: "I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write." 'They' are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, 'beliefs' hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.

Capitalism is still accelerating, even though it has already realized novelties beyond any previous human imagining. After all, what is human imagination? It is a relatively paltry thing, merely a sub-product of the neural activity of a species of terrestrial primate. Capitalism, in contrast, has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence to create a new life and a new plane of intelligence, vast beyond human anticipation. The Transcendental Miserablist has an inalienable right to be bored, of course. Call this new? It's still nothing but change.

...

Life continues, and capitalism does life in a way it has never been done before. If that doesn't count as 'new', then the word 'new' has been stripped down to a hollow denunciation. It needs to be re-allocated to the sole thing that knows how to use it effectively, to the Shoggoth-summoning regenerative anomalization of fate, to the runaway becoming of such infinite plasticity that nature warps and dissolves before it. To The Thing. To Capitalism. And if that makes Transcendental Miserablists unhappy, the simple truth of the matter is: Anything would.

Arising historically during the European Renaissance — when zero, place value and technocapitalism finally breached the ramparts of Western monotheism — qabbalism (born in a semiotic glitch and thus lacking the authority of tradition or even purpose) was compelled to hyperstitionally generate an extreme antiquity for itself, in a process that is still ongoing.

Technically, qabbala is inextricable from digital processing. Emerging from calculative practicality within the context of blind mass-cultural metamorphosis, it antedates its own theoretical legitimation, making sense of itself only derivatively, sporadically and contentiously. Its situation is analogous — and perhaps more than analogous — to that of a spontaneous artificial intelligence, achieving partial lucidity only as a consequence of tidal pragmatic trends that ensure an integral default of self-mastery. Practical systematization of technique precedes any conceivable theoretical motivation. Dialectical interrogation of qabbalism at the level of explicit motivation thus proves superficial and inconsequential, essentially misrecognizing the nature of the beast. (It is equally misleading to ask: What is a computer really for?)

... surely the link between capitalist technoscience and the internal conceptual lineaments of AI/A-Life research is extrinsic and contingent? Otherwise the implication is that it was historically impossible for Turing or Langton to have been communists ... — while some germinal scientific thinking and even rudimentary technology can be situated 'prior' to capitalism (if capitalism is given sharp Marx-type historical definition), the type of runaway trend that has come to characterize technoscience within modern societies has such profound entanglement with the modes of specialization, industrialization, investment, semiotic abstraction and programmatic research exclusively characteristic of capitalism that it is very hard to make a sharp division between a distinct 'intellectual lineage' and the wider social process. A certain conception of communism (or other post-capitalist modern society) might problematize this, but that would depend on maintaining that such a society itself escaped parasitic dependence on capitalism .... Since 'actually existing soci*lism' has relapsed into global capitalism, such alternatives remain extremely speculative.

...

Allow me to briefly digress on capitalism and hyperstition — a relation which you portray as significantly less tormented than is in fact the case. My contention is that all hyperstitionalists should concur on the fact that robust systematic narratives are of central analytical importance and that capitalism has provoked a number of these, to different degrees of condensation, coherence and cultural virulence. It seems to me highly plausible, though analytically distinct, to invest these capital-related narratives with special prominence (although someone could with complete hyperstitional consistency effect a reduction of capitalism to, for instance, a fluctuation in the bacteriosphere (or sunspot activity) and cash-out socio-economic descriptions into an entirely different register, perhaps even dissolving the phenomenon to general satisfaction). Finally, even if the special privilege I have given to intelligenic catastrophism as the dominant capitalist 'tropism' were accepted, both the theoretical and practical political consequences drawn could be entirely different.

The complete circuit/system of "marketing and venture capital" PLUS "the scientific disciplines themselves" is an 'object' from which hyperstition cannot retreat, and may even provide its sole adequate social application, even if you are quite right that merely blurring the distinction between the two is unhelpful at best. At least, I suspect that hyperstition cannot be reduced purely to the 'disciplinary' pole of this circuit, the operative machine requires both. Quantum computing cannot be conjured into existence by mere belief, but neither can it arise without the social investment dependent on its virtual credibility (the vast flow of resources into nanotech — based in large part on a tacit SF scenario — is an even more prominent example).

Re the claim made on behalf of capitalism as planetary singularity and locus of terrestrial history — Isn't everything currently happening on the planet governed by gravity at least as much as by capital production? But then why is capital production more important than gravity?

This provides an excellent opportunity to return to 'machinic'. Gravity is mechanically significant, but not a source of machinic production (although, of course, machines can make use of gravity — as capitalism does). The conceptions of 'governing' are incommensurable. Still ...

Unless of course the real focus of hyperstitional interest has always been socio-cultural and, by implication, human all along?

... basically, I concede the point, although the autonomization of culture from the human species is — of course — the principal issue at stake (and one reason for privileging capitalism, which seems alone capable of doing this). Since capitalism prospectively offers terrestrial matter the opportunity to engage in deliberated technical manipulation of its own substance it takes on a biotechnological and geotechnological sense far exceeding any preliminary delimitation of the 'ethosphere'. In fact, subsumption of the earth into the (post-human) ethosphere is the ineluctable machinic destiny that the word 'capitalism' tags.

On what basis do you identify the definitive phase transition in the history of the planet? Surely it's gratuitously biocentric to define it in terms of the shift from a carbon to a silicon (or whatever) based substrate for intelligence, as if terrestrial history necessarily converged upon social and/or intelligenic complexity?

Consumption of the earth (by the then definitionally 'off-planet' machine) far exceeds the characteristics you note — the Oankali eat planets — anything less is eco-conservatism. Realize manifold conceptual issues (teleology in another aspect, still remain).

More generally, if there is such a thing as 'universal history' then why privilege the history of the earth? (Unless wilfully rehabilitating a pre-Copernican perspective?)

Probably a perspectival limitation — no off-planet examples of radical techonomic runaway (terminal-phase planetary process) yet identified.

Again: why this apparent totalization and hierarchization of the ramified multiplicity of complex systems currently unfolding on the planet by privileging the emergence and development of capital production as the most significant event in all history?

Because capitalism has an unparalleled voracity, and even the truly giant terrestrial systems (the bacteriosphere etc.) will be absorbed by it on current trends within a modest historical time-frame. Alternative narrativizations privileging alternative complex systems to be encouraged here, however, and if they can be highly politized ('insect politics', 'bacterial politics', 'crustal politics' (that might be piet but can't understand with his mouth full of rock chippings)) so much the better.

Simple answer, capitalism is already hyperpoliticized and thus already lined up to take narrative precedence — you're right to see this as a 'culturalist' skew.

Think I've at least touched on your subsequent remarks — basic point 'capitalism is good' (or 'bad') doesn't mean very much, too weak even to support a contradiction — won't take a huge detour into moral theory, but I consider 'X is good' to broadly equate to 'lets do X' in this context, which is exhortation not argument.

Inhuman / 'good' for humans — no inconsistency I can see — absorption into the techonomic swarm can be simultaneously ultimate liberation and utter horror — Eastern religions are better at this type of cosmic ambivalence than monotheistic-manichaean ones IMHO.

There already exists a perfectly cogent theory of "intrinsic purposiveness": it's called Aristotelianism.

A far superior theory is basic cybernetics. Negative loops appear self-conserving, positive loops appear to 'desire' growth. 'Purposes' are abbreviations for coherent nonlinear dynamics (cybernetic plexions).

...

Genes aren't 'using' us for anything. Genes don't have purposes. They don't 'want' anything. And neither does evolution.

A thermostat doesn't 'want' to stabilize a temperature, capitalism doesn't 'want' to create AI explosion, the apparent teleology is an effect of machinic circuitry, but since purposes are so readily reduced to cybernetic diagrams, the folk (intuitive) attachment to teleological language need not trouble us unduly.

Interesting juxtaposition of claims:

1. Capitalism is a hyperstitional construct
2. Capitalism is a 'real/natural/material' (take your pick, but basically non-anthropo dependent) occurrence or happening: 'cyclone, earthquake, meteorite impact'.

There is a capitalism event (#2) but it is necessarily, and in fact multiplicitously, narrativized for the purposes of human intelligibility (#1).

Can you say a little more about ... this 'intelligenic event' ...?

Vast amount to say here, so I won't try to be remotely comprehensive yet — the main point is just that Capitalism includes technoscience in its basic macroscale feedback loop, thus trending strongly to artificial intelligence technologies (of many kinds) and even to 'singularity' in the Vinge sense (surpassing of human cognitive capabilities within the technosphere, thus on a dynamic — and accelerating — curve).

This virtual event is simultaneously a stupendous liberation of machinic potential and a biogenetic catastrophe for (conservative human) organisms, since it abruptly terminates the human genetic lineage as the principle replicative axis of social reproduction. Hence the bipolar cybergothic/emancipatory rhetoric you (and MKP) point to — this inconsistency doesn't seem very serious to me — it's mostly quasi-random aesthetic variation based on irresponsible yarn-spinning. Horror is by far my favourite affect, so I can't resist turning everything into a horror story — feel free to blank it out as conceptually trivial.

Is capitalism intelligent? — room for much definitional squirming, but if high intensity information processing and problem solving are the basis of judgement, then for sure.

... favourable to the emancipation of intelligence? Yes, and more importantly, to the emancipation of the latent intelligence within sub-engineered matter.

... marking a rupture with the cosmological order? Not sure whether I quite understand this question — nature seethes with breaks (inflection points, emergence thresholds for dissipative structures), so capitalism is a typical anomaly.

And if it does, how does this supposedly immanent auto-catalysis of intelligence (limitrophic convergence of social production with cosmic schizophrenia?) differ from familiar spiritualist eschatologies concerning "the end of all things"? — apex question. No simple answer will suffice, with much resting on what is encompassed by "spiritualist eschatologies" — given the structure of intelligence catastrophe as mentioned above, any precursor model of the Other (Dark?) Side will be necessarily insufficient (to an almost illimitable extent) — lending an apocalyptic aspect to the anticipation.

Nature doesn't wan't anything. Neither life, nor organisms, nor capitalism. Moreover, while capitalism is undoubtedly better understood in terms of DST than the dialectic, it's neither more nor less singular than any complex phenomenon in the history of the planet. From a physicalist — or cosmological rather than terracentric — perspective, it's as trivial as a mega-tsunami and as banal as stale bath water spiralling down the drain.

This seem unobjectionable — but why should a putative teleology of nature be invoked in the first place? It's the intelligenic event, 'abandoned' by a senseless cosmos, that introduces the only (strictly intrinsic) 'purposiveness' that will ever be found.

Part of the interest of the meme theory is that it introduces a generalized Darwinism where a diversity of replicators and their interactions contest the monopolistic position of DNA segments (genes, (bio)viruses, units of intragenomic 'junk'), dynamizing alternative substrates.

Mark Downham's sketchy model of the 'metrophage' (term stolen and radically transcoded from Kadrey's cyberpunk novel of same name) speculates that substantial 'techonomic' segments of social existence are autonomizing themselves in this way — for instance, technology (in general) seems to essentially involve the assembly of rapidly evolving replicative lineages that are broadly parasitic (or at least symbiotic) upon human populations. The trend of economic units to 'deterritorialize' from specific familial/tribal unities to become self-reproducing (with usage of replaceable human components) intensifies this autonomization trend — Gibson's 'the Zaibatsu are like giant animals' (not exact quote). Finally, contemporary robotics is putting the elements into place to potentially sever the relation of parasitic dependence (for 'better' or 'worse' to speak stupidly) — is there even the possibility of a post-Darwinian evolution algorithm that exceeds the efficiency of genetic algorithms allowing technoreplicator units to radically intensify evolution beyond mere 'trial and error'? — perhaps that is a speculative step too far right now.

First consider 'Capitalism.' There is really no doubt that whatever is happening on this planet is doing so under conditions guided by capital production.

...

'Capitalism' no longer describes an analytically coherent totality, such as a 'mode of production' rigorously comprehended by antagonistic theory. It is now a proper name, the Thing taking place, an occurrence or happening, no more in need of exact portrayal than a cyclone, an earthquake or a meteorite impact.

The right have always been reluctant to acknowledge the shocking singularity of capitalism, so disruptive of conservative assumptions and universalistic complacencies. It seems that the left has now joined them, happier with pronouncements of emotional allegiance than analytically defensible commitments. Almost everyone would probably prefer to avoid the hard task of precisely defining the singular course of terrestrial inevitability under the conditions of capital's pilotage (social conservatives are unlikely to be enraptured by its destination). That is no reason for hyperstition to evade the question.

IMHO the teleology/deferred gratification complex has proven one of the most obsessively pursued here, for good reasons and with a lot of further digging to do.

The dark hypercapitalist angle on this would be that 'the Thing' puppetizes humanity into investing in an inhuman becoming by tantalizing it with an artificial future (one of eventual abundant satisfaction of human desires). Of course, there's room for a passionate (IMHO highly romantic and conservative) humanistic critique of this manipulation. The more difficult question: is there also a compelling antihumanistic critique?

1. 'Oedipus' is a reterritorialization, that's to say it only appears because capitalism is actually chewing-up humanity — sure, kill Oedipus, but that doesn't mean capitalism is in any real sense 'humanizing' (quite the opposite).

   Capital/Oedipus: torch the monkey while giving it a doll to play with to keep it quiet.

2. Really don't think 'teleology' is appropriate here. Capital's only 'teleology' is MORE ('escalation' = contagion). If that's a telos, what wouldn't be?

   It definitely has an obscure teleonomy — phase-shift to (approximately) polytendrilled intelligenic posthuman cyberspace. Sorcery can live with that.

3. Apologies for fundie marxism, but doesn't a critique have to align itself with a plausible revolutionary potential if it's to be anything other than conservative lament?

   Think D&G had it right: "accelerate the process".

Some semi-random initial stim-points — not intended as a consistent series (I could kind of be persuaded by most of them — definitely like no.3):

1. The opening credits of (Carpenter's) In the Mouth of Madness — torrents of pulp horror novels flowing from the presses to sicken the world — captures an essential hyperstitional nexus, an archaic abomination re-animated through technocapitalist mass-production and marketing (discuss).
2. When D&G describe capitalism as The Thing (Carpenter again) they are precisely delineating its mechanism (anorganic take-over by an alien insider).
3. The technocapitalist syndrome functions as a megaweapon system promoting shoggothic insurgency (and Bill Joy understands it best?).
4. Hyperstition emerges spontaneously during the phase of capital when the autonomous economy begins to reflexively probe its own stimulation mechanisms (neomarxist determinism rocks).
5. 'Cyberspace' designates the phase of capitalism (Downham) in which hyperstition eats the economy.

Or whatever else serves to feed the thread.

Mesh-Note 1. This was never programmed.

MIT codes tim(e) going backwards. A compacted technostreaming from out of the future — AI, downloading, swarm-robotics, nanotechnology ... Crustal-matter preparing for take-off.

SYZYGY: Data-kit.

AxSys.

1. Axiomatic Systems (incorporated).
2. The ultimate capitalist entity (first (true (meta)model) to realize perfect identity with its own product), (autocommoditizing (machine(-intelligence (that is always incomplete (due to cataloguing problems (...))))))
3. The first true Artificial Intelligence.

...

Hyperstition

1. Element of effective culture that makes itself real.
2. Fictional quantity functional as a time-travelling device.
3. Coincidence intensifier.
4. Call to the Old Ones.

Techno-commercial interaction between planet-scale oceanic-navigation and zero-enabled mathematico-monetary calculation machinically singularises modernity or Sol-3 capitalism as a real individual: a geo-historical nucleotelic system, based upon regeneratively techno-propagated concentrational scale-economies, and tending to immuno-securitised self-identification as hyper-mediated global-micro-technic command-control. It arms-races smooth cultural decoding to flat-schizophrenisation against episodic social recoding to hierarchical robotism and algorithmic control, coupling the meltdown of organisation into the jungle with its restoration as virtually totalised global order.

...

When technophobia becomes frictional it operates K-positively, as an inertial immuno-reflex folding the security datascape into a metric cyberspace reconstruction, neuromantic nuclear mono-mind twisted into self-apprehension, configuring its source in machinic commerce as positive technomic nonlinearity, auto-propelled into terrestrial hypermedia-fusion. Cross-cumulative trends to interconnection, digitalisation, and simulation plot forward the interexcitation-trajectories of electronic cash and market-oriented software to their convergence in commoditechnic intelligent-money. Time-compression infinitises. No future.

In its geohistorically efficient — negative — sense, protestantism exhaustively defines itself by refusing the authority of Rome, not only in principle, but in military fact. A self-prolonging runaway revolt against the Church was triggered at a date proximal to 1500, and catholic unity began its haemorrhage into multiplicities strewn across zero: capitalist terraprocess, net explosion, digital revolution, parallel insurgency clambering from the dark-side of the brain. Oceanic navigation and place-value calculation interexcite in a spiral. What globalizes itself in reality — rather than in doctrine — is the collapse of Christendom positivized into communicable social disequilibrium, dropping you through unfathomable intensities of social decay. K-virus impact. Melted-out protestantism disorganizes into voodoo, and drifts towards China.

...

Monetarization indexes a becoming-abstract of matter, parallel to the plasticization of productive force, with prices encoding distributed SF narratives. Tomorrow is already on sale, with postmodernity as a soft-commodity, subverting the modernist subordination of intensification to expansion, and switching accumulation into continuous crisis (prolonged criticality). What modernity defers and reserves as inexhausted historicity, postmodernity accesses as efficient virtuality, with concomitant contract-time implosion. Mass computer commoditization de-differentiates consumption and investment, triggering cultural microengineering waves that dissociate theopolitical action into machinic hybridities, amongst increasingly dysfunctional defensive convulsions. Acephalization = schizophrenia: cutting-up capital by way of bottom-up macrobacterial telecommerce, inducing corporate disintegration. The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic apparatuses subverts the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into the impossible.

Capital has a double aspect; that of a Form (or series of forms), and that of a singularity. Under the second aspect terrestrial capital process is not a generic essence, but a unique event, designated by a proper name (like hurricance Julie or the Vietnam war).

Yes, I am treating capitalism as a (virtually) integrated planetary system that overwhelms all incommensurability. Don't aim at where your enemy is now, but where they will be in the future. All restricted local economies are melting into general economic dynamics, at great and accelerating speed, with an ever more sophisticated array of techno-financial hyperinstruments installing compatibility. Tax systems (combined with government borrowing on international markets) already provide the grid, as D&G point out in Plat.-13, and IMF universalization has reached escape velocity. There isn't a chance in hell that regional political initiatives can achieve long-range autonomy from the fate of the planet as a self-organizing system or singular artificial eco-process.

Marx removes abstraction from philosophical idealism and relocates it in the monetary-industrial process, as exchangeability-plasticity neutralizing power as increasingly anonymous economic control and dehumanizing the proletariat (production 'for itself') through deterritorialization-disorganization of the 'natural' body (cyborg becoming). Abstraction is matter degree-zero (BWO), no longer thought as the encasted pinacle of reason in stratified societies, but pragmatics interlocking the body into street deals, bottom-up micro-intelligence (Seamus said lots of excellent stuff about this too).

Telecommunism: cyberspace emerging from (/as) the postmodern planetary market-place and cooking private subjectivity in the anonymous burn-basin of schizophrenia, panicked power coming apart in the cyclonic free-fire zones of massively parallelized nano-cyberserk AI emergence, China-syndrome, irreversible social disintegration, and oedipus melting away through 'trodes into voodoo inhumanity.

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

...

Multiplicities captured by singularities interconnect as desiring-machines; dissipating entropy by dissociating flows, and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry.

Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ...

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

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[[ ]] Capital is machinic (non-instrumental) globalization-miniaturization scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive control: from status and meaning to money and information. Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy. Machine-code-capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering-out the shit and blood-stains of primitive accumulation. Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expenditure, whilst the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia. Dissociated consumers destine themselves as worker-bodies to cost control.

[[ ]] Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated successively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process.

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[[ ]] The Turing Test. Monetarizing power tends to effacement of specific territorial features as it programs for migration into cyberspace. Capital only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment; reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag.

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[[ ]] Scientific intelligence is already massively artificial. Even before AI arrives in the lab it arrives itself (by way of artificial life).

Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectionist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory-dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model net-sentience irruption as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical.

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[[ ]] Convergent waves signal singularities, registering the influence of the future upon its past. Tomorrow can take care of itself. K-tactics is not a matter of building the future, but of dismantling the past. It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical-neurochemical deficiency conditions for linear-progressive palaeo-domination time, and discovers that the future as virtuality is accessible now, according to a mode of machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress. This is not remotely a question of hope, aspiration or prophecy, but of communications engineering; connecting with the efficient intensive singularities, and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical development. Virtuality counterposes itself to history, as invasion to accumulation. It is matter as arrival, even when camouflaged as a deposit of the past.

Rotted by digital contagions, modernity is falling to bits. Lenin, Mussolini, and Roosevelt concluded modern humanism by exhausting the possibilities of economic planning. Runaway capitalism has broken through all the social control mechanisms, accessing inconceivable alienations. Capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback, organizing itself. Turbular finance drifts across the global network.

Wiener is one of the great modernists, defining cybernetics as the science of communication and control a tool for human dominion over nature and history, a defence against the cyberpathology of markets. His propaganda against positive feedback — quantizing it as amplification within an invariable metric — has been highly influential, establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future. There is no space in such a theory for anything truly cyberpositive, subtle or intelligent beyond the objectivity required for human comprehension. Nevertheless, beyond the event horizon of human science, even the investigation of self-stabilizing or cybernegative objects is inevitably enveloped by exploratory or cyberpositive processes.

The modern Human Security System might even have appeared with Wiener's subliminal insight that everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind. Evolving out of work on weaponry guidance systems, his was an attempt to enslave cybenetics to a general defence technology against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept under control, under a control that was not itself cybernetic. It is as if his thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away from another, deeper, runaway process: from a technics losing control and a communication with the outside of man.

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In the final phase of human history, markets and technics cross into interactive runaway, triggering chaos culture as a rapid response unit and converging on designer drugs with increasing speed and sophistication. Sampling, remixing, anonymous and inhuman sound, woman become cyborg and taken into insanity: wetware splices with techno.

Capitalism is not a human invention, but a viral contagion, replicated cyberpositively across post-human space. Self-designing processes are anastrophic and convergent: doing things before they make sense. Time goes weird in tactile self-organizing space: the future is not an idea but a sensation.

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Sudden transition from ice to water, phase change, punctual anastrophe of the system, is impact on convergent rather than metric zero. The earth is becoming cyberpositive.

We might not know what's going on, but we're getting warmer. Only the enemies of immuno-identity populate the future.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Our fin de siécle is the coast of planetary zero, washing up against the cyberspace singularity camouflaged by a self-organizing global marketplace.

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We have far too narrow a conception of computer generated images. They are arriving in other ways. Human history as a cultural software system is a program run upon the cyberspace matrix in the future, but it also opens onto the matrix (at a date already programmed in the matrix).

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They are beginning to say that the 'Earth Mind' — reported upon by so many shamanistic explorers — is planetary cyberintelligence in the future, but try not to believe it. Just look.

Along one axis of its emergence, virtual materialism names an ultra-hard antiformalist AI program, engaging with biological intelligence as sub-programs of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding any deliberated research project. Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future.

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Addiction comes out of the future, and there is a replicator interlock with money operating quite differently to reproductive investment, but guiding it even more inexorably towards capitalization. For the replicants money is not a matter of possession, but of liquidity/deterritorialization, and all the monetary processes on Earth are open to their excitement, irrespective of ownership. Money communicates with the primary process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain.

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.

The reality principle tends to a consummation as the price system: a convergence of mathematico-scientific and monetary quantization, or technical and economic implementability. This is not a matter of an unknown quantity, but of a quantity that operates as a place-holder for the unknown, introducing the future as an abstract magnitude. Capital propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose desires it reprograms. It incrementally virtualizes production; demetallizing money in the direction of credit finance, and disactualizing productive force along the scale of machinic intelligence quotient. The dehumanizing convergence of these tendencies zeroes upon an integrated and automatized cyberpositive techno-economic intelligence at war with the macropod.

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Markets are part of the infrastructure — its immanent intelligence — and thus entirely indissociable from the forces of production. It makes no more sense to try to rescue the economy from capital by demarketization than it does to liberate the proletarian from false consciousness by decortication.

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Reaching an escape velocity of self-reinforcing machinic intelligence propagation, the forces of production are going for the revolution on their own. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is a revolutionary program guided by the tropism to a catastrophe threshold of change, but it is not shackled to the realization of a new society, any more than it is constricted by deference to an existing one. The socius is its enemy, and now that the long senile spectre of the greatest imaginable reterritorialization of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past.

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Cyberspace.

Here it comes.

The terminal social signal blotted out by technofuck buzz from the desiring-machines. So much positive feedback fast-forward that speed converges with itself on the event horizon of an artificial time-extinction.

Suddenly it's everywhere: a virtual envelopment by recyclones, voodoo economics, neo-nightmares, death-trips, skin-swaps, teraflops, Wintermute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion, polymorphic hybridizations, descending data-storms, and cyborg catwomen stalking amongst the screens. Zaibatsus flip into sentience as the market melts to automatism, politics is cryogenized and dumped into the liquid-helium meatstore, drugs migrate onto neurosoft viruses, and immunity is grated-open against jagged reefs of feral AI explosion, Kali culture, digital dance-dependency, black shamanism epidemic, and schizolupic break-outs from the bin.

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

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Anorganic becomings happen retroefficiently, anastrophically. They are tropisms attesting to an infection by the future. Convergent waves zero upon the body, subverting the totality of the organism by way of an inverted but ateleological causality, enveloping and redirecting progressive development. As capital collides schizophrenically with the matrix ascendent sedimentations of organic inheritance and exchange are melted by the descendent intensities of virtual corporealization.

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A cybernegative circuit is a loop in time, whereas cyberpositive circuitry loops time 'itself', integrating the actual and the virtual in a semi-closed collapse upon the future. Descendent influence is a consequence of ascendently emerging sophistication, a massive speed-up into apocalyptic phase-change. The circuits get hotter and denser as economics, scientific methodology, neo-evolutionary theory, and AI come together: terrestrial matter programming its own intelligence at impact upon the body without organs = 0. Futural infiltration is subtilizing itself as capital opens onto schizo-technics, with time accelerating into the cybernetic backwash from its flip-over, a racing non-linear countdown to planetary switch.

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

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How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one's software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this?