This is the second post in a series where I'm interviewing my peers on X in long form. Coming after the first one with Zoomer Schopenhauer, this time around I'm talking to Baroquespiral, also going by the display name on X of “Moe Maximizing Superintelligence".
Baroquespiral is the author of a number of texts, most recently and prominently Theory of the Young-Boy, which is a counterpart to Tiqqun's celebrated 1999 text Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. I highly recommend purchasing this text, it's wonderful.
The author has the rare ability to sketch out a metanarrative laying out what has happened on the internet since the birth of Web 2.0, in which rapid culture shifts have led to each micro-generational cohort experiencing a new plane of collective imagination, each with a slippier and more ironic use of basic language than the last. While Tiqqun's Young-Girl text analyzed how technocapitalism wants to turn everyone into an object which wants to be looked at, Young-Boy analyzes the other side of this story - those who want to look, follow, comment and lurk. In a kind of psychedelic horror story which mixes in continental philosophy with references to video games and obscure online comment sections, Baroquespiral traces how this dynamic has made our collective imagination more violent.
Read on because we cover a lot of interesting stuff, including anime, the state of academia, ecology, Elon Musk, space travel, virtual reality, utopia, and religion.
Hi, thanks for agreeing to be featured! I’ll start by introducing you to the readers, by telling them how I came across your work, and why I think it’s important. I recommend your writing to a lot of people but I never know exactly how to sell you or what your “deal" is or the philosophical position you occupy. Politically, you describe yourself as a leftist, but you’re not really anything like the stereotyped images of leftists people have - or at least to a lot of people I recommend your work to I have to say “don’t worry, he’s not that kind of leftist". Spiritually, you’re as I understand it a Thelemite, which is a position that can raise eyebrows, but you also don’t fit into an easily caricatured model of a Crowley follower.
We’ve been online friends for quite some time, probably since about when I started posting which was during the Covid lockdown. I think we occupied a space together in this niche in Twitter of very weird theory types, in the Logo Daedalus orbit mostly, where people were impressing each other with obscure philosophy books and attempting to read prophetic signs into history, things like that, a lot of very eccentric and unhinged people. That space seems to not really exist anymore, partially because the whole discourse of eccentric people online has been gentrified, now that “schizoposting" has become a trend amongst people trying to market startups and memecoins.
I think the reason I get along with you is because to me the position you represent to me is a spiritualization of the leftist impulse, and to me that’s the right path. Like, to me the leftist impulse to envision a much better world based on mutual care rather than naked use of power must be maintained, but at the same time I don’t really see any possible leftist coalition emerging to inaugurate this; the structural conditions just aren’t there. So if the leftist is to not abandon the sacredness of his ethical commitments, he has to see himself as seeking a miracle which would inaugurate a Kingdom not of this world, and so this becomes closer to a religious worldview, though not exactly the same as a classical religious worldview either. Thought that comes from that kind of space of political theology is what I’m interested in, and what is needed right now. Not sure if this aligns with how you see yourself but this is my view of the shared context.
On top of that, I view you as probably the most insightful cultural critic I know of today. Probably your very original standalone perspective is what allows you to do this. You’re able to comment on all sorts of micro subcultural trends online and treat them as important, yet in a measured and reasonable voice. The concept of the "monocult" you’ve articulated is one of the best syntheses of ongoing trends I’ve seen anyone establish. Your book that I just finished reading for the second time, Theory of the Young-Boy — which I definitely recommend to anyone reading this — manages to weave a kind of meta-narrative of the past fifteen or so years of the internet and the archetypes it has given us and how it affects politics within the War on Terror.
So I want to talk about your cultural criticism, and the Young-Boy book, but I suppose we can start first by letting you introduce yourself and your projects, and maybe your own description of what you see as defining the perspective you occupy.
It’s surprising how hard I find it to do this given how much time I spend sorta thinking about it (the classic TLP bit about the narcissist who fantasizes about being interviewed, lol). In a less broken world I like to think I’d mostly just be a writer; my most personally important work is all over at Andata Express, including my own serial novels It’s A Good Thing the Dark Lord is a Shut-In and Mercenary Planet. So maybe the sense in which I’m “not like other leftists” is that almost Moldbuggian political reluctance which requires in turn a kind of unflinching realism; my libido isn’t invested in politics for its own sake, the contradictions of capitalism are a pain in the ass for me personally and most of my friends belong to the marginalized groups towards which the right increasingly defines itself by gratuitous cruelty. But at the same time I call myself a “presuppositional leftist” which is to say a toxic altruist, a contagious universalist etc.; I embrace the most inconveniently utopian premises of the left because to me they are the natural extrapolation of the embrace of free will, identification with the Other, qualia, pleasure in variation etc. that I enjoy as an artist (and particularly a poet/novelist, which is to say a student of the objective variability and moral consistency of human nature). The core of my beliefs that’s remained more or less consistent since I was a kid feels a lot like Scott Alexander’s “good things are good” and the fact that I arrive at a “radical leftist” position from it rather than the Matt Yglesias liberal one he does in that post mostly comes down to my conviction that most people arbitrarily limit their sense of historical possibility for reasons that have nothing to do with their values, or history, at all. Insofar as I hold out faith in a “miracle” it’s very much the kind expressed in something like Higurashi When They Cry: there’s no eschatological deus ex machina coming to save us, a “miracle” only happens when everyone works for it, but the “outcomes” of “work” can’t all be guaranteed in advance by M-C-M’ or “evidence-based” predictions. The problem of a “left coalition” right now is that it’s not willing to submit to organizing at the level of institutional politics - which comprehensively rejects it for reasons it already theoretically understands - but the “activist” modes outside it are basically restricted to “demanding people in power Do Something”. So I think the model for left power-building ironically has to be less “political” and more “economic”. You can’t demand “all power to the soviets” if you don’t have soviets, and part of what went wrong with the Soviet Union is that they tried to impose too much of this from the state level down, which is what Marx wanted as a Hegelian but isn’t how any of the previous economic revolutions worked.
I arrive at all this via a sort of double life path where I’ve been in academia, was raised by academics, grew up reading a lot of old books instead of watching TV or playing video games, but at the same time I’ve been around the internet a lot. Pretty much as soon as I left home I just got “one-shotted” by it the way the turbonormie in the meme does by DMT; my mental health was very bad for a while and I had the kind of extreme OCD that Shut-In Dark Lord is an attempt to narrativize and process, during which I was constantly on both 4chan and Tumblr and got to observe their culture war divergence in real time. Eventually I got into Twitter as a sort of natural synthesis of these. Thelema suggested itself to me by signs and helped me resolve a lot of the really bizarre shit I was going through, but for the same reasons I think it resolves a lot of the contradictions of modernity more consistently than anything else - albeit for a very specific set of criteria that might be particular to me. I’ve always struggled with being simultaneously drawn to like, Robert Graves-style poetic/intuitive “matriarchal traditionalism”, Christian ethical universalism and scientific rational progressivism; Thelema reconciles those in the formulae of the Aeons of Isis, Osiris and Horus. I also like how it deals with the contradiction between individualism and collectivism which is another thing slowly bleeding the “left coalition”. On one hand, progressive interpersonal ethics seems to demand the sanctity of bodily and emotional freedom to an extent unprecedented even within liberalism, on the other hand, we want economic equality and collective action towards problems that affect everyone, and I’m not so naive as to assume the spheres in which we’re demanding these are completely non-overlapping magisteria. The standard compromise no one will admit to is “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”, but calling yourself an unironic Benthamite is even cringier than an unironic Thelemite, partly because I think most continentally informed leftists correctly recognize that you can’t actually put numbers on psychological states and calculate them. True Will on the other hand isn’t a quantity, or a qualia, it’s action that justifies itself, and the idea that everyone has to individually find these self-justifying actions (which can be hard and even “unhappy” from the outside) but, in the last instance, none of them have to contradict each other - “every star has its orbit” - seems like the only possible spiritual conclusion for a world in which post-scarcity is achievable but the basis for “value”, including collective *and* material value, has been revealed in the process as arbitrary. The “law of the strong” stuff from Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit seems pretty anti-leftist but it doesn’t say how you have to define strength, what you have to use it for etc.; what it precisely refuses is any criterion of value that can only exist parasitically at the expense of others, which is equally true of the “predatory” ones extolled by BAP and co. There’s lots of points where I disagree with Crowley on particulars of interpretation (and I’m not a member of any IRL order) but that’s I think what made him a useful vehicle for a method of asking and answering these questions for yourself.
I realize I’m talking more about my values and beliefs than “my deal”. None of these are the things I focus on in my work; on a material level I want to figure out how to become a “venture communist”, in my academic life I’m writing a PhD thesis on rationalfic and webnovels, and in my creative life I’m trying to write things that synthesize these paradoxes as convincingly as I’ve seen in works like Shaman King, When They Cry or Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand while backing them up with the social and psychological detail and self-justifying formal beauty I value in the Western literary tradition. (Poetry is the closest thing I know to Pure Will in words, but also as for Graves its themes are usually nature and love, and it very much comes and goes as it pleases.) I’m also trying to be a “producer” to a small stable of writers I’ve helped gather from across the internet who are doing the same thing in their own unique ways. I usually think I sound a lot more convincing talking about specifics than generalities, and on some level I really do respect the Young-Girl’s limitation; solving the meaning of life, the universe and everything just isn’t my job. On the other hand, I can’t just ignore it or let other people decide it for me. What I can do is solve, in the sense of dissolve, these contradictions constantly in order to do the things that actually need to be done, for myself and others, and not get Pascal’s mugged by delusions that I have to do something else, or even hurt someone, because I won’t be able to found all my axioms otherwise, which is what everyone increasingly seems to be wasting all their energy fighting over instead of the actual things they need or want. (Like why we’re fighting a culture war instead of a climate war.)
Yeah, I think if there is going to be a common theme in who I do these interviews with it’s going to be people who for whatever reason are drawn to the arts and intellectualism but find existing ladders of finding funding and influence to not really work for them. Potentially, in the abstract, a class like this could be revolutionary, even if in more of a metaphoric sense than in the sense of violent revolt, although I think it’s not clear at all yet what productive channels for collective empowerment look like.
I was thinking about modern art, as in late 19th, early 20th century modernist art and literature, and how at the time these works were being made the class of people making them was considered the biggest group of losers on the planet. While the average upper class person was abiding by strict Victorian codes of morality and manners, these poets and painters were spending their lives in cheap rooms drinking absinthe and having sex with prostitutes and making art everyone else considered to be terrible. They were considered to be degenerates, which then wasn’t just a casual insult but an actual scientific theory people believed in — moralists were very concerned that the genetic material of the race itself was biologically deteriorating, and these losers were the evidence of that.
Eventually a small cohort of wealthy people decided that this art was worth putting on a pedestal, and this coincided with the managerial “revolutions” in the 1930s which established the big administrative states, so these artists who were originally the rejects and exiles became institutionalized and put on pedestals as prototypes of “important art” for public schools and national art grants. The reason modern art won out probably over academicist art is because while it rejects technical skill, it’s more intellectually stimulating, there’s more to talk about.
If some equivalent scenario were to happen today, I think it would involve art that has been ghettoized into internet subcultures to start getting celebrated in public space as intellectually important, given that the work of random internet dwellers is often much more rich and thought-provoking than the mainstream. In particular I think art that is disparaged as autistic or schizophrenic today could maybe become pedestalized in the future. These words today are like the slur of “degenerate” in 19th century speech, a pseudo-scientific label for a style of thought and activity that people are afraid of. You sometimes talk about the Japanese term “Denpa” as someone who acts out of step with the world and seems to be controlled by unseen forces, as if someone is commanding him with radio waves. In America we have this pathologizing of people who are “too online”, which is a little ridiculous because practically everyone is on their phone 24/7 today, but there is this sense that if you spend too much time outside of majority-consensus social reality and inside mass-improvisational memetic social reality you will become some kind of conduit for demonic forces.
Your book Theory of the Young-Boy is a really interesting text in how it takes all kinds of internet content seriously as a text — Homestuck, the Gang Weed meme page, Honor Levy, Angelicism, all get the same treatment as “serious” writing, but its perspective of what’s going on the internet and what the internet is doing to our psyches actually seems remarkably bleak. The bleakness of the argument is easy to miss because of how fun the text is to read, but your thesis is something along the lines that in the long run, the internet turns everyone into a school shooter personality type.
With respect to what you were saying about leftists needing to economically organize outside of the system, this then raises the question of how we even define the system and find its outside. You write at the beginning of your book that the system in question goes beyond capitalism, it goes to the beginning of time, we might as well call it the Archons or Moloch. It seems like your book would suggest that the system “wins” today through the operation of creating the young-boy — there’s no stable outside of freedom to be found on the internet, there’s just the system doing the equivalent of providing you in a Fed entrapment scheme to be the patsy for its next false-flag terrorist attack.
Theory of the Young-Boy is a response to Theory of the Young-Girl, which is a similarly bleak text about everything else. So it’s not like I’m coming at this from any sort of “we need to go back”; the internet represented a very real line of flight, which I’m trying to explain how it got captured in turn. I’m also not making a technological determinist argument; the internet is the Young-Boy’s privileged medium, but he is a psychohistorical, even spiritual formation. The Gnostic vagueness of the system/enemy is also something inherited from Tiqqun, but it becomes unavoidable when you’re analyzing things like this, patterns that seem to spread across every level of analysis and are only discernible from the inside. A lot of my methodology is like, reading negative space - why are people not doing or saying this or that thing that might equally follow from their premises? - the Young-Boy and Young-Girl, and the force behind them, are both kind of like Dark Matter shaping the infosphere, and as such it’s easier to personify them than model them as mechanisms. But there are definitely things older than Capital at play here. When I started working on this Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch was really big on Tumblr, which got turned into a football for various identity political arguments that obscured what struck me as its most radical premise - the bourgeoisie didn’t really overturn the aristocracy in an existential revolutionary struggle either, as early as the late Middle Ages the aristocracy was transferring power to the bourgeoisie in order to suppress the pressures of popular revolt. And the same transfer seems to be happening now to a new techno-feudal class. So if it’s not “class interests” in a sense defined by any particular organization of class, what is this transhistorical continuity of sovereignty? I think that’s also one of the unanswered questions of an “intersectionality” that claims like, every oppressive structure is entangled in every other.
Anyway Young-Boy is an uncharacteristically pessimistic text for me in part because it’s channeling its subject. I have other writing that’s obviously less so, but I write to the requirements of specific material, so I don’t feel obligated to insert my complete worldview or a uniform “tone” into everything. Mercenary Planet and Shut-In Dark Lord, in particular, are kind of responding to its problem from different angles; Shut-In Dark Lord, obviously, is about this guy who’s stuck between complete isolation and releasing his death-drive and destroying the world, it’s taking how I felt at my worst (when Young-Boy gestated) and asking “what if that was literally true, what then”. Mercenary Planet is about someone with radical politics but no real power being thrust into a position of historical agency and having to figure out what to actually do, under circumstances that are both extremely difficult and constrained but also novel and unpredictable, and with other online Types also trying to take advantage of the same opportunities. And then of course there’s all my solarpunk work, which is the most optimistic end of my spectrum, but I’m very much trying to bring it down to Earth from ~Miyazaki cottagecore vibes~ and figure out how green, non capitalist futures could actually work, even though to maintain the tonal conceit I usually skip over some moment of revolution or crisis that got us from here to there. But I still have to think it through, to some extent, because the particulars of that moment shape the particulars of the future.
I guess my family history is a bit relevant here. My mother is a moderately famous Canadian visual artist, so I grew up really immersed in the contradictions of modernism and its descendants, and very blackpilled about it. She went to art school in the 70s when everything was all Theory all the time, everything you did was negatively defining itself against other art, and anything remotely representational (which is what she really liked to do) wouldn’t even get the time of day; of course there’s only so much you can negate in a closed loop, which is one of the paradoxes I observe in internet discourse with the Young-Boy. And meanwhile the real social structures the avant-garde wanted to negate through art it’s become completely dependent on, because you have no popular audience you’re basically just reduced to a speculative asset for rich people who at this point would rather just trade NFTs. Or to an object for academic programs to sustain themselves off, which is more what’s happened to theory and poetry. And I’ve always rejected the assumption that this is the only “legitimate” course for serious, ambitious “avant-garde” art to sustain itself, but outside that there are two big attractors, the Scylla and Charybdis of the Young-Girl and Young-Boy: either just chill out and become a normie, which is itself increasingly restricted (commercial publishing is its own nightmare world I can go on about), or translate your abstract negation into actual violence, of which the reactionary kind is easier than the revolutionary kind - hence in New York, the “avant-garde” thing now is to be MAGA because no matter how tired your form you will “really” offend someone, because you’re “really” threatening them. The system is outsourcing its violence to you the way it used to outsource its formal innovation. And the left has to amp up its violent rhetoric even where it’s institutionalized and not actually doing anything for the same reason.
Your point about the continuation of sovereignty from the aristocrats to the bourgeois, and then from the powers that be to the technocapitalists today is really interesting.
Maybe, to be a bit of a pessimist, there’s sort of this problem where you can look at, for instance, the common story you hear about the Allied effort of denazification after the war victory, which is that it was somewhat incomplete because they eventually ran into the problem that seemingly every competent person or person with leadership experience they could put in charge had been involved in Hitler’s regime to some capacity. So there’s really only Power, which is sort of this horrific nexus that creates Auschwitzes and Epstein’s islands, and then this just ends up consuming everything that tries to do good, because in order to do good you have to get Power first, and there ends up being no other game in town, and then it turns out eventually that you don’t have Power, Power has you.
I had this friend who was trying to convince me that programmers are soon potentially going to become a revolutionary force and was trying to write this bespoke Marxist-Leninist philosophy for American programmers, and I was trying to tell him that this wasn’t going to work because there are still plenty of good opportunities within the system for programmers, and that all the best programmers are going to compete for roles in corporations and VC-backed startups which are part of the “fascist" problem from his perspective, and that for programmers to lose this aspiration and join his leftist party they would have to be somewhat of a misfit (eg queer) or mentally unwell in some way, otherwise they would have no reason to identify with the oppressed over the oppresser. But I could also see things getting worse soon with the tech class if the amount of jobs shrinks, where basically this group of intelligent capable people who thought they were getting the golden ticket to a stable upper middle class life are suddenly left with nothing to do, that maybe could be a group that could play this revolutionary role in this way, cut off from Power but still competent and capable.
When you talk about these green, non-capitalist futures: I always think about this from a kind of Heideggerean lens. If you’re familiar, Heidegger writes about capital within force he calls Gestell, which is like this power of quantification which increasingly begins to take over all of life, so that nothing escapes being measured and made available-on-demand for some transcendental agent. This is the opposite of an ecological perspective, within which a field of trees isn’t just the same as x units of lumber which can be abstracted from its position in the world and sold on the market, but rather is something that sustains an ecosystem, the bees in its beehive, the soil wrapped around its roots, etc. A logic of pure capitalist quantification and interchangability can’t go on forever, it eventually breaks down the stable patterns which sustain life itself. So some kind of new eco-logic of reproduction which is more qualitative than quantitative is needed to prevent apocalypse. But there’s just no way within the relations we exist in to get from A to B. Heidegger by the end of his life is lamenting that “only a God can save us", and saying that there’s nothing philosophy can do to get us there, all we can do is prepare for arrival of this messiah through thought and poetry which would open ourselves up to its arrival. So I don’t necessarily know what you do with that.
The system seems to sustain itself by multiplying these false “revolutionary" potentials which are really just mass symbolic violence directed towards some scapegoat. At this point in America, it feels like the left coalition and the right coalition are equally incoherent on the level of policy and ideology, but co-equally sustain each other by believing if they scapegoat and threaten symbolic representatives of each other, a “national renewal" could occur after the hated figure is purged — something which becomes game-theoretically impossible (even if it were desirable) because each coalition is prevented from gaining more than 50% or so support.
Right now the MAGA people seem to be in this trap like the xkcd comic that goes “there are 14 competing standards" → “that’s too many, we need to develop the one universal standard" → “there are fifteen competing standards". Trump is this potential messiah figure, a force of nature beyond rationality and quantification, and within the arms of his leadership you have this delirious fantasy logic that we can simultaneously have this holistic ecologic understanding of our health from RFK, while having your cake and eating it too as Elon unleashes a new futurism through his optimization and rationality. But this dream is all just glued together by this weird hatred, it’s a kind of gambit that Americans can be united enough by their mutual hatreds and their baseness in a way that transcends the particularities of what those hatred are actually towards. But it can’t really work, right? Trump isn’t a uniter, and his support is still only around 50%. So it’s just another competing universal standard.
I’m also very critical of the overemphasis on Heidegger in environmental humanities! (Again, prefer Adorno.) I mean as a nature-poet, there’s definitely a sense in which I want to get beyond seeing everything as Standing Reserve, but when I talk about “Green” technopolitics I mostly mean a global ecosystem that doesn’t completely break down even at an instrumental level for humans because we’re not paying attention to it. I want both of these things independently, but I think it’s dangerous how much we conflate them, to the point that you can’t even approach the practical issues without a magical spiritual transformation first, or if you don’t care about spiritual transformation you just assume the practical problem is only for “those kinds of people”. Of course they’re not unrelated. The premise of “ecology” to some extent is that different kinds of life and material systems provide benefits to each other by acting as ends in themselves that can only be seen from the vantage point of the system. The problem “green accelerationism” tries to solve is that the system is changing rapidly anyway - even if human technocapitalist civilization collapsed overnight, the feedback loops would still be in motion - so how do we maintain that maintain those mutually beneficial relations in a state of flux, in radically new relations. The alien belief system “Meteorology” in Mercenary Planet is an attempt to imagine how this might work. But even a universalist human Gestell would be better than what we have now, which is why I also want to be careful not to identify capital too much with a general spiritual principle either. Insofar as unchecked climate catastrophe instrumentally isn’t good for anyone, I have trouble believing even technocapital has no plan to address it, just that that plan doesn’t necessarily have a place for you and me, or at least people more vulnerable than us. So the stakes of the question for me are already expanding the circle of who can be integrated in positive-sum ecological dynamics in transition, and including the non-human world rather than having to fight human and non-human enemies at the same time might make that more achievable as well as just following from more consistent axioms.
Escher McDonell’s New Animals, which used to be the flagship story in Holohaus but might be getting a real publication soon, kind of allegorizes climate catastrophe itself as the Heideggerian return of gods insofar as “nature” ceases to be predictable enough to function as Standing-Reserve. (The literal premise is that for some reason, species of animals just start getting replaced one by one by completely alien, kaiju-like lifeforms with all kinds of bizarre powers, implicitly as a kind of natural evolutionary feedback to humans’ runaway acceleration.) In the immediate term, this intensifies the zero-sum survival pressures that incentivize us to try and force it into this framework, but in the long run, the only way to survive is to try and understand it on its own terms. And there are other frameworks, of magic and ritual, that arise in between. You mentioned Logo Daedalus and I don’t think he’s entirely wrong when he warns that the turn to thinking about non-human rights and agency poses a challenge to the foundations of human moral universality the left still cares about, because you get these vast reservoirs of moral value eclipsing any particular human preference but which still have to be interpreted by and to humans. I think a lot of the “monocult” is even trying to do this pre-emptively; gender transition, for instance, becomes this huge flashpoint because it’s seen as making a Standing-Reserve of the body for human signification preferences. But we don’t actually know what “the body” wants in itself (or like, there’s a whole universe of somatic practices that claim this, on all sides of the culture war, but they’re more or less mutually illegible); so instead of trying to treat the particular body, much less the systems within it, as independent stakeholders in individual actions, the ideal of the healthy, gendered body is interposed as a representative for all bodies-in-themselves, like the divine “species-masters” Graeber and Sahlins document among a wide range of indigenous peoples mediating for the animals they hunt - that is, as gods. But then, not only do these people want to do the symbolic action - which you need to embody the “spiritual transformation” for it to mean anything at all, and it needs to be gratuitous and preferably violent - before solving the practical problem, they don’t want to solve the practical problem at all. By way of the COVID anti-science split, the psychological structures of the “Green movement” have been diverted into the main drivers of climate denial - if we can globally undermine its order by accident, Nature isn’t really a god we can worship at all. Again, I think Thelema has good solutions to this. “Nature” is everything (“Pan”), which means it’s always both outside of us, as an endlessly transforming limit, and inside of us, as our drive to interact with and transform that limit.
And it’s also in the emerging autonomous technological systems too - Logo likes to point out that the logic by which you could ascribe personhood to a river is the same by which you ascribe personhood to a corporation, but I’m not so worried about that, I’m not sure technocapital wants to be a person, Nick Land would be as disgusted by a world of cutesified corporate gijinka with ethical rights and obligations as he was by “Woke Capital” probably. AI is another story, and possibly the biggest wild card in our whole global moment right now.
The non-human ethics and Nick Land is an interesting point to remark on, because that’s another thinker I tend to look at this stuff through, meaning the question of trans- or posthumanism and what we should will into being at this juncture. In Zilgothic X-Coda, which is the famous Land text that gets memed because it looks completely drugged-out and unreadable (it’s actually merely obfuscated with stylistic affect), Land is arguing that, while he advocates following a line-of-flight down a path of radical deterritorialization and using cybernetics to dismantle the human frame, and acknowledges that this might kill everybody, it must be done because the alternative is “Auschwitz forever". Basically, to repress the line of flight into posthumanism, you have to repress everything, and this is what the “Human Security System" does. Land actually seems very impassioned about this and fearful about the Human Security System, and this is why I think the text is obfuscated, because it’s one of the rare moments he lets his cold mask slip and, ironically, show the human side. And moments like this I think are why he has such a loyal following among trans people.
So I want to talk to you about Elon Musk. If technocapital wants to be a person, it’s clearly this guy, at least in the current stage of history we’re at right now. And Nick Land loves this, he loves that this Great Man with the personality of a fifteen year old trolling on Reddit and making memes of his cute dog mascot is personifying technocapital and promising us that we will live forever in space with our brains connected to each other and in a political utopia with all communists and SJWs purged.
There’s really a lot that is philosophically fascinating about the Musk moment, although one risks embarrassment prematurely drawing philosophical conclusions regarding an ongoing situation, and we have every reason to believe that Musk is just getting started. But I wanted to ask you how you feel like Musk’s government takeover stands up against your “monocult" analysis because from my perspective it makes you look quite prescient. Musk in his rhetoric basically stands for “humanity", which is an empty master signifier which allows for arbitrarily scapegoating others as “anti-human" if they’ve upset you in some way, but it’s also rhetorically opposed to the transhuman or posthuman while actually being transhuman in practice. It’s a promise that we can have our cake and eat it too with technology, we can get to the sexy Jetsons future and total abundance without bringing in any value drift. And it’s of course notable that Musk got radicalized to the right after his daughter transitioned, this is what convinced him that he needed to save Western civilization.
That being said I don’t really know where I stand on this because while I’m definitely in favor of trans rights on the object-level, when you allow for the world of infinite morphological freedom based on “what the body wants", does that lead to just like, everything becomes this pink goo infinitely fucking itself? For me I think there is this Christian faith aspect where I feel like God basically wants humans to live the best possible lives, as humans, and if you take the as humans part out there’s no reason why we shouldn’t just remove human experience from the equation and tile the universe with orgasmium. But I wish I had a better philosophical way to ground this intuition so I didn’t just have to appeal to faith, and I guess be some kind of dogmatic zealot of the Human Security System. Haela Hunt-Hendrix is always fond of saying that in the Kingdom of Heaven we will be more human, we are not even fully human yet, but she also thinks we will all be androgynous and sexless if I remember correctly. Really I sometimes feel that the future of humanity is for us all to become cybernetic mecha-angels.
I honestly think that might be Land’s best text. But yeah this question of value drift is a really important one, because it’s basically the same as the problem of Alignment, and Alignment is a really complex, dialectical problem, very much the Heidegger case of “where the danger is, the saving power is also". I like to use “Alignment" in a generalized sense, referring not specifically to the zero-sum competition between humanity and “superintelligence", but for the compatibility between any mind or system’s utility function or True Will and any other’s. So the unfinished moral history of humanity for instance can be considered the project of “Human Alignment". In Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest, Land has this powerful description of modernity as a system that “wants to expand indefinitely while reproducing itself as the same". Which is pretty much the description of something like a paperclip maximizer, and Yudkowsky thinks it’s what any optimizer wants to do at scale. And for Crowley that’s a Black Brother, that’s something that fails the commandment that “every accretion must modify me”. But this isn’t a suicidal or masochistic commandment, the Will wants this because “I want to assimilate it absolutely”, because “I am not afraid of losing myself to it”. So Alignment is also this interface between systems, in which they willingly encounter each other and lose but also regain themselves. One thing people miss about “Transcendental Miserabilism" is it’s almost a description of Land’s early thought (which is itself a katamari of every kind of fashionable antihumanism left academia indulged in - the kind of woke synthetic philosophy only people like Emilie Carrière have attempted since). His thesis was literally called “The Thirst for Annihilation“, etc. And the thing that turns so many people away from “woke” values who genuinely don’t seem to want to is that, at least in the discourse (which is compensation for the stagnation of the movement in reality), the negative features of the encounter with Otherness are emphasized even by its advocates.
But yeah the “pink goo fucking itself” problem is a hard one that I spend a lot of time thinking about through writing, especially Mercenary Planet where I’m dealing with much higher tech levels. As finite beings we’re bad at thinking in infinities - thinking from “above the Abyss” - which is why there’s a whole lifelong magickal process to actually cross it, but in the meantime to even conceptualize it provisionally you kind of have to think backwards. “Pink goo fucking itself” scans intuitively as a reductio because it’s boring, homogenous - it’s actually a reduction of possibility. But that’s the opposite of what we were trying to do! What happened to all the possibilities between us and that, which were what we theoretically valued? Well for one thing you have to actually imagine them, which is a positive, productive power that can’t be derived from pure abstraction. Which is why I think any transhuman, posthuman or even simply “woke” movement needs to be guided by art - anime in particular has given me tons of tools think through this because it’s driven by the “imagination-oriented aesthetic", the whole otaku theory of art as a database of recombinatory elements. Which can be negative when the elements are very given-as-is and flattened like in most pop culture “slop", but when you’re really autistically fixated on the range of variability and give yourself as much time as you need to tweak every single detail, with no set assumptions about which are “better" than the others, you can get these stories and images that are both extremely abstracted from any “realistic" limitation and deeply specific in the way realism aspires to. For another, you have to, to some extent, limit yourself to them insofar as you value them - that is, freely choose your boundaries. Note that that’s limitation from the perspective of an infinitely expansive optimizer which is not necessarily the same as restricting modification by accretion. The theory is that once you “come up” above the Abyss, you recognize the value - and mutability - of the material existence below and “go back under” again for the same reasons God created the universe. There’s another sense in which this question has to resolve itself before even getting to this point: in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (and I think Ciconia When They Cry was also pointing in this direction) the ultimate ideological conflict (spoilers) is between the “Utopian” space explorationist transhumanists and the faction that just wants to live forever in virtual reality, which if you’re just interested in Hegelian “negative freedom” or abstract pleasure maximization is technically easier. And the series makes a case for the value of the encounter with space/Otherness/limitation *in general*, as opposed to any particular fetish - you have the same conflict in (spoilers) qntm’s Ra, but in that the physicalist faction are much more conservative, much less imaginative, much more “optimizer-y” (they build like a whole ring of identical Earths), and they lose.
Writing is a great practice for thinking in these terms imo. Both the specificity thing I’m thinking about - coming up with details that are particular and coherent and express something you want to have in there for itself - and then also resolving contradictions between them; a lot of aesthetic decisions I make I can articulate as tradeoffs or syntheses between different optimizing vectors that will subordinate the work as a whole if I’m not careful. And thinking of stories ecologically, where any one detail or structural element might solve a problem I’m struggling with somewhere else - or create another one. (Poetry is the hardest because it’s where I’m the most modernist in this sense, even though my themes and criteria are usually ancient and even my form is relatively conservative for free verse - I want every word to be in as direct relation to every other as possible and rely on the structures and logical syntax less.)
Really good points re: Alignment.
This question of whether we want to go into space or virtual reality seems very alive right now. For the first time the question is being posed to the masses in the form of this Silicon Valley American Dynamism ideology being astroturfed on X after the election. Just now I saw on the timeline that Musk, not one for subtlety, posted today a picture of a sculpture he commissioned titled A Fork in the Road of a literal giant fork jammed into a forking road, making the statement that we need to choose if we’re going into space or not.
Peter Thiel has talked a lot about technological stagnation, in his words “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters". Innovation since the 70s or so seems to have all largely gone into making more efficiant information processing systems rather than physical things. Thiel pointed out in some talk the timing of how the first man landed on the moon in July 1969, marking the peak of American industry, and then the next month in August 1969 was Woodstock, this great festival of consumer spirituality, sort of setting the paradigm for everything that has come with the marketing and packaging of private experiences.
A lot of this plan seems to be breaking down though, because private experiences and virtual reality just aren’t working as a frontier anymore. The whole metaverse thing they wanted to turn into a bubble is completely dead in the water. Even video games as a medium are totally stagnant compared to the early 2000s. The technocapital people can’t just keep making apps, because it turns out all the good apps have already been made. At the beginning of the Web2 app era you of course have capitalism telling you as it always does that the new paradigm is going to totally transmute the world into candy technicolor Disneyland forever, and everyone is downloading all these games onto their phone and other goofy apps for a million different things, but as it turns out people basically just need Netflix, Uber, UberEats, AirBnb, Tinder… they just want the thing they already want whether it’s food or entertainment or sex to get to them faster. And now everyone is disappointed, because past a certain point, information technology doesn’t even trend towards a stable form of escapism, it trends towards a bizarre form of torture by giving you what you want as fast as possible in a way that makes you miserable, like you’re experiencing some ironic punishment the devil would devise for a greedy person in Hell.
I really don’t know where I stand on the space thing though. I came out against it in the first draft of Anti-Singularity but I think I’m going to have to revise that because right now I’m a lot more ambivalent to say the least. My initial take was that Elon and his fanatical space ambitions make him a kind of parody Great Man, similar to how Trump is parodic, because, like, it reveals a lack of imagination basically. The space fantasy is just this fantasy that’s there in the collective unconscious, placed there for military propaganda in the Cold War, but then when you examine it, what is actually out there in space? Coldness and rocks? I’d much rather stay here on Earth, thank you… But now the way I’m thinking about it is like… Hobbes writes about the infinite felicity of man, meaning that there’s no end to his desires… this would seem to be true in any civilization without an intense religious focus, in which man’s infinite desires can be directed towards the infinite object of the divine. For better or for worse, we don’t seem to have that, so we demand greater and greater objects and experiences to satisfy our desires. I think moralists are sort of wrong to bemoan how middle Americans have it so well but still have this ennui because we want more… capitalism is legitimately a process that we have the right to always demand more from, because that is what it offers us as the reward for our subjugation to it. As long as we live under capitalism and not Atlantean anarcho-eco-communalism of the well-aligned chakras, if the system doesn’t keep giving us better Marvel movies, more immersive video game worlds, more variety in cheap fine dining, we have the right to smash it. Right now it’s sort of failing and no one is into it. Ketamine might get legalized which is definitely a good way to escape into inner worlds, but idk.
The fantasy I guess with the spacefaring civilization is that energy becomes so cheap and abundant that it’s almost like Sburb from Homestuck, you and your bros get your own planet that just sort of gets spawned out of another one and you just play Minecraft in real life, figuring out how to tame its terrain and build civilization. Maybe not everyone gets to go to space at first because not everyone can be trusted with these high-powered replicators — maybe if you’re the demiurge, you keep people enslaved in video-game Wall-E world here on earth grinding the early levels of the video game in attention-economy late capitalist hell — if your group chat is able to launch a memecoin that makes it to $1B market cap, only then do you get to play Sburb.
From what I’m reading, to re-orient the economy so that getting to Mars is actually possible, you would basically need to do a revolution first, there are too many vested interests in rent-seaking and not this kind of productivism. Which I guess is what Musk wants to do. But I did read this book that just came out and was endorsed by Peter Thiel called Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, which argues that financial elites can create a new bubble around American Dynamism and just engineer it this way. I’m trying to figure out how it’s possible to do forecasting on the near future so that I can write accurate commentary on everything that’s going on and position my own career, but right now it seems too chaotic to make sense out of anything.
It seems like there’s a weird misdirection here though, because right now technocapital is so concentrated that the same people are building both sides of Palmer’s (spoiler) “Trunk War” - Elon Musk is working on both rockets and Neuralinks. But the culture war he’s engaging in is “techno-optimism” vs some woke decelerationism probably aligned with environmentalism. There is a sense, in like the ontology of the Young-Boy, that the “virtual reality” option doesn’t need technical virtual reality, just the Spectacle, or even just regular human imagination - the capacity to replace action (and sacrifice) with signs - and that imagination has to be disciplined somehow to restart material progress. That’s kind of what I took that big rant he posted about Iain M. Banks’ Culture (which he used to take as a model for the future he wanted, when he was still married to Grimes) as being about. Or Thiel’s Woodstock vs moon landing thing but that’s like… not even a false dichotomy to me so much as a constitutive one. Like Woodstock happened because you had a society that was so productive it could put someone on the moon but couldn’t figure out what to do with that besides live in the suburbs and eat jello cakes. And of course a lot of the original hippie movement wanted to posit an alternative to consumerism, and of course the BAP half of the right is trying to reclaim the vitalist, archaic aspects of the 60s while accusing the left of having settled for our bugs-and-pod equivalent of that, etc. Hiroyuki Takei, the author of Shaman King, is a figure who embodies and articulates a lot of the contradictions around this really well for me. On one hand like myself he considers himself a kind of scion of the hippie movement, and inserts spiels in all his manga about how we don’t look up at the stars anymore, and what the fuck is money and war is pointless and we should all slow down and think about the existential reasons for our actions more and we’d be happier. On the other hand he’s an otaku who lives in an ultramodern Kanye-esque crib full of Gunpla and Airsoft and real luxury cars and designs all his shamanic spirits to look like cool mechs. It’s like the Miyazaki contradiction except he has more fun with it.
I’ve always been optimistic about space just on the basis of why not and growing up with books of cool space photos - I also went to a “space sim” in high school which was most anime-like experience of my life. A big part of my Master’s thesis was arguing that leaving Earth and ultimately the solar system is the only way to escape the Bataillean problem of always needing to sacrifice an accursed share, because you’re no longer spatially constrained relative to the solar energy input and can grow to the limits of your resources in any direction. And Thelema supports this too; the Aeon of Isis corresponds to the Moon or the Earth as the dominating principle, the Aeon of Osiris to the Sun, and the Aeon of Horus (in which “the principle of sacrifice… is a mistaken idea”) to the Star(s), although it has both solar and stellar aspects - I think we won’t actually reach the stars until the hypothetical Aeon of Ma’at (which dumbass “post-Thelemites” like Marco Visconti want to declare prematurely to get away from the problematic aspects of Crowley’s thought and his predictions about the Aeon of Horus as a violent, warlike period, but I think that follows from the contradictions of getting out of a planetary hegemony). Ma’at is also the principle of Justice or Adjustment, which corresponds to being able to manage a system so precisely that you can survive without energetic excess as a buffer, in an absolute void where if you run out of energy you just freeze to death. Growing to the limits of your resources precisely means accepting real limits that aren’t forced on you by sacrificial violence. So that’s both something you need to figure out on Earth first, and on some level can’t, which is next Aeonic contradiction probably. The Heath cycle solves this by having humanity extend into a united solar-system polity before attempting the real Abyss. I’m not saying it has to be anybody’s first priority - although my argument with Green Accelerationism was also that the zero-sum binary between space development and climate management on Earth is also a false dichotomy. Climate change is literally a problem of too much solar energy being trapped in the Earth system and you have more options if you can dispose of some of that accursed share into space, let alone getting resources from there.
As I’ve always said, I’m not that interested in forecasting even though I seem to be relatively good at it, I’m interested in doing things and modelling conditionals. I don’t believe in fate or at least omniscience. “Will we go to space?” Well, any Great Filter that could stop us permanently would have to be pretty horrific, but that’s a separate question from “when will we go to space” and “what, if anything, will we do there”. The argument in Terra Ignota as I understand it is that going to space allows you to encounter and experience real novelty, real Otherness, produced by the infinite interactions of forces that don’t give a fuck about you, as opposed to just iterating on the database of The Human Condition forever (“better Marvel movies, more immersive video game worlds, more variety in cheap fine dining”). Of course you can make an ecological argument that you can get this by continuing to iterate on any open, material system, and the idea that you need to keep expanding to do this is colonialist. I think both of these are true and you don’t have to need to do something to want to, and remembering that you’re doing it because you want to is important to keeping the colonial, extractive logics out of space travel. And if you don’t that’s fine!
I think we covered a lot of ground so I think we can mostly tie this up. I wanted to ask you one more question though: as an artist who thinks the way you do, using popular media as a muse to develop sweeping eschatological and spiritual perspectives from, what do you do to simply relax and stay sane? It’s a bit of a curse I imagine to think this way, as you can’t just turn on TV to zen out and not think, as that’s all part of the process, anything and everything can be interpreted as prophetic signs, right? Do you experience your creative process as having breaks, or is it a kind of always-on, all-consuming thing?
I’ve adapted a lot better to the “prophetic” part of what I do since 2020 I think - again it was really destructive from about 2014 to then, which is an interesting timeframe in itself. That’s part of what Thelema helped me with and also psychoanalysis - and a lot of that was letting it be always-on and not compartmentalizing it. But in 2020 I had a therapist who specifically wanted me to take reading fasts for that reason, which did help ground me in the material world but didn’t actually stop me from overinterpreting signs because we live in a world of them! Even if you try to isolate yourself something freaky will jump out at you from a fucking license plate! It’s just the *excess* of information that of makes it harder to weigh meaning the way the ancients did with bird flights and entrails. On the other hand it’s already the excess of information in the natural world that makes it sublime! Anyway this is why I’ve never approached art in terms of “turn off your brain”. My most “turn off my brain” activities are probably things like scrolling the timeline precisely because it allows me to use my brain on a really low level of applying formal logical hermeneutics to random bullshit from idiots. There’s a certain exertion to engaging with - or making - real art (or treating any art as real), but that’s more important to staying sane because it lets you actually resolve things, at least on the level of a “dialectical image” of utopia. The idea of just scooping bits of nothing out of this wall of chaos is like trying to turn back the tide with buckets. It’s endothermic. Every therapy that told me to just chill out and stop paying attention to stuff didn’t work. Same reason optimism/pessimism is a fake dichotomy. I worry all the time, and as long as the worrying is honest and oriented towards doing my best and affirms the ultimate value of experience, it is what keeps me sane.
Yeah that makes sense. I’m asking just because I deal a lot with this same question, I’m definitely in the market for more “self care" activities. Things that put me more in touch with the body but also actually feel good and don’t require all that much discipline is what helps, which right now is basically singing and lifting weights. The problem with a magical or superstitious worldview is that once you’ve accepted it you’re on duty 24/7, there are no breaks, because you could be alone in your room preparing for bed and have an idle thought that gives you poisonous karmic consequences.
I’ve had some bad experiences with “dire karmic consequences for idle thoughts” myself and I try to make “compatibility with a materialist model” a criterion of sanity for interpretations at least on an ordinary basis. An absolute demand contradicting this would be a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, of a similar order of ontological paradox (and possibility) to a material miracle. Admittedly my definition of material is pretty expansive - we’re getting close to the kinds of technology that are indistinguishable from magick, which is why it’s important to learn to think in infinities. But your position in the infinity where you can actually affect things is finite, and once you can think in infinities you can more easily recognize where it’s nonsensical to do so. I keep trying to find an anecdote about Jack Parsons pausing magickal practice as such while he was attempting to cross the Abyss and dedicating himself to material endeavour, will let you know if I find it. But your Will and your task are in your material manifestation, as long and as far as that distinction remains coherent.