Technofeudalism and the Return to the Real

What makes the modern manifestation of cloud capital, integral to the Technofeudalism system we live under, is that it’s impossible to go anywhere without having it glaring at you. It hovers above the heads of modern people like a cloud, taking all our attention and carefully curating it, effectively extracting life energy and transmuting it into data and narrative.

Nick Land extensively talks about hyperstition, and the memesis we see via social media enables false narratives to take on a life of their own, often manufactured by the techno-oligarchs themselves in service of their political ambitions.

In my experience of leaving social media, I go through an almost “withdrawal period.” That’s how satanic the modern system has become. For the first week of leaving Instagram, I felt genuine FOMO, with self-directed copes imagining all the “connections” I’d be losing, all the “opportunities” I’d be missing out on (which is true, but not in the way I’d imagine).

Now that I’ve been silenced on X, I have naturally found an aversion for the platform, due to its express ability to create self-propelled narratives for the user to confirm their own confirmation biases, as well as the heavy-handedness of Elon Musk on a platform that should ostensibly be “free speech” based.

Social Media Grazing (as it should be rightly called: you’re grazing on information very much like a cow) is a manifestation of a “Surrogate Activity” for the active principle of social interaction, and it’s a very poor substitute for the real thing.

It’s also evident from a linguistic perspective that there is a very active and pernicious “war AGAINST literacy,” with the slangification and denigration of language to the point that it’s nearly impossible to express deep, profound, and meaningful thoughts that would have occupied the priests of the ancients, and a complete loss of metaphysics and connection to the absolute.

In effect, post-capitalism results in Technofeudalism through the active principle of “peasantification” of the non-oligarchical class, in all aspects of life: the way you speak, the slop one consumes, the trash one listens to, the filth one speaks.

Neo-Luddism and the Return to the Natural “Power Process”

I predict over the next few years, there will be (and already has started to be) an extreme aversion for technological accelerationism, especially on the fringes of the Left and Right wings.

Personally, I used to look at AI with rose-tinted glasses, but recently there has been an enormous level of black-pilling and gas-lighting on the subject, as there has appeared to manifest a partnership between Silicon Valley and Government to “rebuild” the internet as a massive data farm.

The most recent example of this is the shutdown of Libgen and Zlibrary. Copyright laws and other forms of lawfare have disproportionately targeted the autodidacts (who were the original beneficiaries of the early internet, through unprecedented and life-changing access to high-quality information), yet in service of the oligarch.

Recently, Meta was found to have trained their Large Language Model (LLama) on the entirety of LibGen, one of the most popular shadow libraries in the world, which allowed MILLIONS, who otherwise wouldn’t have access to information, with the opportunity to learn. Meta largely got away with it, with barely a slap on the wrist, while the platform itself has been eaten up by courts, and finally banned.

This is just a case in point, but it reflects a broader theme of spiritual decline of the internet as an institution, a grotesque morphing into a massive data farm for our future AI overlords to feast on and then start dictating policy (I will probably write a post on AI censorship in the future).

The Apollonian AI, the Dionysian Human

But back to my point, the mass-churning out of content only elicits the desire for the experience of that which is truly authentic: authentic friendship, real love, true intellectual novelty that’s only attributed to art, myth, story, and the like.

The current drawback when it comes to the modern Neural Network architecture that powers all the AI models that seem to come out every week and encroach more and more on our lives and livelihoods is the “uniformization” and “fake perfection” that is often the output of the model.

Human beings aren’t perfect; they’re prone to errors, and that’s the beauty of human beings. Our imperfection and our awareness of our inadequacy is the root of ALL artistic wonder. Even the greatest magnum opus has slight imperfections, and that’s what makes them unique.

Neural Networks operate through the analytical, Hebbian manifestation of thinking, with definite and continuous cause and effect, distributed through layers of abstraction through thousands of artificial neurons. Symptomatic of the scientific materialist paradigm that permeates the research related to the field, AI does not FIT ideas such as intuition, but rather trial and error until it can fit an “ideal” to the best of its ability.

The Dionysian mental paradigm is rather one of entirely abstract, inexplicable revelation, the mechanism of which is uncertain and immaterial (although I suspect it has something to do with “vril,” “chi,” “prana” energy that the ancients were obsessed with). The Dionysian mental paradigm is channeling the unconscious and the collective unconscious, the realm of the archetypes, that is uniquely human. The experience is FELT, not DESCRIBED.

Teaching AI to come up with novel and transcendental experiences is akin to trying to teach an alien to understand abstractions such as the felt experience of love, or the feeling of a sunset on one’s skin, or the vividness of a dream. As such, even though AI art and prose, poetry may increasingly appear to be “realistic,” they’ll always appear slightly eerie or “off” to the human observer, as they lack the “soul” that is uniquely human.

The Return to the Natural “Power Process”

The natural “power process” is a concept that was coined by Ted Kaczynski in his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, which is the idea that human beings have a natural desire to be in control of their own lives, to have autonomy and mastery over their own domain.

The modern technological society has stripped the individual of this natural power process and has instead replaced it with a “surrogate activity,” which is a poor substitute for the real thing. So the question is: in a post-AI future, how does one find an authentic power process in a world that is increasingly dominated by AI and automation?

It’s an obvious truth that there would be tremendous social and psychological upheaval when machines encroach on the central identities of a human being, which is their life’s work/occupation. I believe in some ways, this will resuscitate an understanding of how fake and superficial many aspects of modern living are, from abstractions and bureaucratizations of the most basic human needs and impulses.

My hope for humanity in a post-AI future is a realization of how fragile and fallacious our institutions are, and how easily they’ve been co-opted by artificial bureaucracy, from the level of “paper money” that is worth more than what’s printed on it, to the absolute cog-ification of the human being in the modern workplace.

It’s easy to become blackpilled on the subject, especially with the systematic brainwashing that’s becoming evident day by day on the technofeudal plantations—but I do think there is a natural correction that’s imminent, with many people wishing to return to that which is natural and authentic.