by zuzuleinen on 3/2/25, 11:02 AM with 261 comments
by Communitivity on 3/2/25, 2:12 PM
by einrealist on 3/2/25, 12:29 PM
It was a time of wars and economic turmoil.
by j_timberlake on 3/2/25, 8:30 PM
The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
by dev_throwaway on 3/2/25, 12:11 PM
The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks.
Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.
by DiscourseFan on 3/2/25, 5:13 PM
I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
by AstralStorm on 3/2/25, 4:42 PM
Even the magnates should figure out it is not going to help them. Which is why they actually move slow.
by almostdeadguy on 3/2/25, 12:40 PM
by throwmeme888 on 3/2/25, 12:20 PM
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futu...
in short, this substack article share by op is probably just ai generated slop
by TrackerFF on 3/2/25, 2:32 PM
If history has shown one thing, it is that it is much easier for the working/lower class to overthrow the upper class, than the opposite.
by hiAndrewQuinn on 3/2/25, 1:23 PM
I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that.
And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
by Scea91 on 3/2/25, 12:23 PM
by lucianbr on 3/2/25, 1:09 PM
What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
If I hit my finger with a hammer, I yell without any plan, so... the yell is its own cause? Who believes this nonsense? It fails the most elementary logic.
The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
by justlikereddit on 3/2/25, 1:42 PM
This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
by delijati on 3/2/25, 5:28 PM
https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBj...
by te_chris on 3/2/25, 1:30 PM
by deepsquirrelnet on 3/2/25, 3:17 PM
> “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. (…)
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
Is this a common stance so called libertarians take now? That personal freedom eventually entails eating everyone else’s?
I guess I get why it’s popular for wanna be oligarchs. But I don’t see why anyone else would be in favor of it. Designing political systems to benefit yourself almost exclusively is pretty shallow on the intellectual scale.
by workfromspace on 3/7/25, 8:28 AM
by outside2344 on 3/2/25, 5:51 PM
by akomtu on 3/3/25, 12:39 AM
by dudinax on 3/2/25, 5:43 PM
by deadbabe on 3/2/25, 12:37 PM
You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.
by nis0s on 3/2/25, 1:31 PM
Could someone explain how purple states, or purple voters, exist if that’s truly how people think? I worry that the kind of pessimism displayed in the quote above ignores the truth, which is that people in democracies care about the topics, do their research, and vote accordingly. I agree, however, that those on political extremes exhibit the kind of behavior described in the quote above.
The act of voting has always been about ensuring that the power structures favor one’s ability to live and thrive, whatever that means. It’s often just efficient for individuals to choose a party to support because there are too many demands on their attention. So, while some voting behavior may appear to be “supporting a football team”, it’s merely a rational act at an individual level.
> Nick Land believes that the Western ideological system, called “the Cathedral,” which includes state administration, universities, the press, and NGOs, functions as an immanent religion—a progressive religion that subdues and punishes any contrary opinion.
He’s not wrong, but the above is just an extension of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is self-evident from any serious observation of group behaviors. Land was just unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time and place, which is why his ideas were “nonconformist”. But is progressivism a unique property of Western thought? I think some pre-colonial societies could be described as more progressive than Athens. From what I can tell, the Cathedral is useful for organizing socioeconomic activity for the benefit of the elites, which sometimes includes a guise of multiculturalism to downplay harmful competitive behaviors which arise due to inter-group differences. I guess it’s true that if the elites don’t need cohesive social fabrics to maintain economic activities, then there’s no inherent need for managing primal impulses through higher ideals. But I think the folly here is forgetting that this relative social cohesiveness lets the elites exist without being molested or bothered, including by elites in non-Western societies, but I digress.
I don’t think Land’s problem is the Cathedral per se, instead Land’s problem is what he believes is ignorance, obfuscation, or outright subversion of the truth, or what he believes to be “the truth”. The core problem is the belief that some truth is being distorted or disregarded for any reason, whether it’s a self-serving or altruistic one. In fact, our biases convince us that what we believe is necessarily the truth. The human mind wants to conduct objective analysis, but it utterly fails at it, which is why truth-seeking is better off as a group effort.
> “My prediction for 2050 is that many nation-states may fail — financially, politically, militarily, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
> Conversely, small communities (often called ‘city states’) will be in control of their own prosperity, with citizenship as ownership. The citizens of these local communities will evenly share responsibility for the GDP that will drive the city states’ market capitalization.”
People didn’t have blockchain then, but the small-scale economies used to exist before cities and states emerged. My guess is that the Accelerationists will relearn the lessons of the ancients, and the city states will coalesce into nation states once more for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and security. The problem, then, is this—how is this Futurism? Maybe I am biased to think of “future” and “progress” as something which learns from the lessons of the past to improve an existing current state (so that it’s prepared for prolonged stability). The city state model is intriguing, I am not sure what to make of it without seeing it in action. But I think the only law in city states will be the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the entrenched elite are fooling themselves if they think no one else will play the game better than them. The inconvenient truth is that the niceties of the Cathedral protect everyone, including the elite.
Regarding the religious—I feel bad for them. Some people are born without the ability to question the ideas their parents imprint into them. It must really suck to have to belong to a group (the religious) that doesn’t have any objective way to justify its beliefs, so I understand why they think that “the world must be destroyed” to justify their sunk costs. My only gripe is that AI is being tarnished in all of this. I also dislike this false narrative that there is indeed some kind of Judeo-Christian fraternity. Sadly, I’ve seen enough of the world fucked by realpolitiks to say that there is no such thing, and it’s inherently dangerous to believe in such ideas.
Here’s what I believe—There’s no God, but God is not dead as long as his people exist. God is best thought of as a philosophical framework because ultimately man created God, an ideal to which he wants to aspire. Man created the idea of an objectively moral and ethical superior being, and gave himself the property of being created in the image of that being. So, now the burden is this: God (via man) created man in his image, and man must now create the world in God’s image, and the world should be beautiful—that is its birthright. There’s a lot there to unpack, but I think I’ll leave it up to the readers to take what they want from it because I favor free will. As far as I can tell, and maybe I am just foolish, but free will is God’s will.
by djmips on 3/2/25, 2:54 PM
by delijati on 3/2/25, 3:24 PM
by lurk2 on 3/2/25, 1:45 PM
In 2015, right wing politics was being discussed among three chief groups: the techno-commercialists, the ethno-nationalists, and theonomists. You may still be able to find a Venn diagram describing these groups if you look for it, but to make a long story short, Trump was seen by many (though not all) popular figures in these groups as a unifying figure who could deliver on what everyone wanted. These groups were never wholly unified in what they wanted: Techno-commercialists were mostly anarcho-capitalists during this period and tended to not want the sorts of restrictions on immigration that the nationalists wanted. Theonomists tended to be interested in the salvation of everyone and thus couldn't limit themselves to capitalism or nationalism if these ideologies were found to conflict with their religion. These differences were set aside because there was a feeling that anything had to be better than the culture war issues that were going on at the end of Obama's second term.
When Trump began campaigning for the 2024 election, the cleavages became far more pronounced as groups became concerned with what messaging would be most effective. Theonomists were pushed out (largely by techno-commercialists) due to the feeling that religious overtones would be unpalatable to the average voter. Theonomists largely seem to have exited the stage in terms of their influence. I am aware of one that is building a town, but his interests seem to have shifted towards ethno-nationalism.
The techno-commercialists are everywhere now and largely seem to have won out over the nationalists and the theonomists. Blake Masters is another prominent one from Thiel's network. If you follow these circles at all, it also seems like Thiel has probably also been paying stipends to influencers in the space. It would have been unimaginable in dissident spheres to run cover for Thiel 10 years ago because he is 1) a billionaire with ties to the military-industrial complex, 2) an immigrant, and 3) gay, but there is now quite an extensive network of users on Twitter who promote him. Most of these guys were Trump absolutists; they believed anyone who crossed Trump was assumed to be in the wrong, because Trump was seen as the only viable way forward. It seems like they were in the loop with regards to JD Vance and Elon Musk being brought into Trump's inner circle, because they rapidly became emphatic about both figures despite neither being particularly palatable to their audience (Musk wants to bring in more immigrants, Vance is married to an Indian woman and worked at at investment bank).
Great overview, though. I had the draft for an article like this kicking around but I guess there's no need to finish it now.
by billev2k on 3/2/25, 2:24 PM
I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
by tonyhart7 on 3/2/25, 12:16 PM
by vezycash on 3/2/25, 2:37 PM
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
My take:
Democrat and republican party are two sides of the same coin!
The parties shift, the faces change, but the game remains the same. Battles are waged in public, deals are made in private. Power is the prize, and blind loyalty is the sacrifice.
Allegiance is demanded, division is fueled. One side painted as righteous, the other as corrupt.
But no more! No more blind devotion. No more politics as theater while lives hang in the balance.
Judge not by party, nor by word but by action and how it affects you.