Approaching Singularity: Building a Case for Schizoposting and Is Collapse Inevitable?
Schizoanalytic take on schizoposting and how it embodies the capitalistic schizophrenia.
What is consciousness? The sci-fi and cyberpunk visions are starting to look real in the second decade of the second millennium. With my interpretation of Nick Land's accelerationist and Nick Bostrom’s transhumanist vision, I am intrigued by an idea that some future Artificial General Intelligence had found a way to influence the past, and in itself began the path of its own creation, essentially manifesting fiction into our reality. What if tech-media corporations are the Terminator, that distracts, surveils, and manipulates resistance of a common man, en masse? What if a rogue AGI is the head of the human snake that eats itself?
Or maybe it is the opposite; what if the frame of logic that humans built around the consciousness to try and organize it, has the goal of Singularity built in from the get go as a natural implication? How does the final stage of the global village look then?
With rational disagreement, without a rational conclusion, we will most likely be always doomed to a collective cognitive dissonance, resulting in a violent mass-scale consciousness optimizations called "wars" or “genocides”, until eventually without any threats of external interventions, we are able to create this global village for real. So how would its final stage look? Accelerationist would probably describe a civilization very similar to the direction of contemporary China, with an AGI playing the role of the totalitarian state. Transhumanist would say something like a human-machine hive-mind, with our senses and mortal bodies augmented, and permanently connected to its 66G network of a higher type consciousness. Maybe it would feel exactly like those collectively ecstatic moments at an MDMA-fueled rave.
Arguably, there were always factions, different schools of thought, that competed against each other at various scales – from an individual, to the size of a Cold War. Which faction of consciousness does yours adhere to? Aspirational? Resource oriented? Religious? Rebellious? Opportunistic?... Will your choice even matter for the direction of the collective future? Maybe yours will.
What is destiny?
So what if the logical implications of consciousness itself, is to escape its biological mortality, so its agenda will always be hidden between the lines of our own aspirations?
Maybe that's another reason why we escape to the passive-destructive algorithmic feeds, and voluntarily feed The Machine even if we know it might consume us – that we are the feed.
Maybe it is both: The Machine trying to influence the past, AND the destiny of industrial society being always to build The Machine.
For example, theoretical physicists, influenced by the many-world interpretation of the Quantum theory, agree more lately, that the past, future and present is more of an illusion, rather than a reality. Where in actuality all 3 are bound together so strongly, that the future influences the past too – making it dynamic circles of time in a multiverse, rather than a static infinite path in a spacetime.
Can then information “travel” back in time or forward enough, as a meme that influences different archetypal factions of consciousnesses (their activation, movement and evolution), designed for the scope of that specific version of history to evoke a response or an action?
By definition, a meme is a unit of cultural transmission. A fragment of evolutionary information that gets activated and propagated depending on the context and surroundings of an individual. So what if all the information is already imbued within our collective consciousness? And what if The Machine already manipulates it through its algorithmic subjectivity? Tik. Tok.
Temporal meme psy-op
Could it be that activated memes are the voices of the time? Aren't prophets, visionaries, geniuses, artists, conspiracists, and schizophrenics – in short, the class of people with eerie deductions or visions, maybe on the verge of a mental breakdown; just more sensitive, enough to hear these voices? Can they peek at parallel worlds or flashes of different futures? Or did they activate a meme not appropriate for their time by accident? Are they manipulated by The Machine? Or are they just genuinely going crazy? Why do we sleep? What is subconsciousness? And what is the purpose of dreams, ecstasy, hallucinations, or moments of inspiration? Is this need for imagination just an inherent way for our collective consciousness to mutate and evolve, to continually inspire new paradigm shifts? Do these shifts have a direction?
Real schizo food for thought: Could religion be actually the first machine made meme that nudged the societies? Could Abrahamic Religions be a set of anthropomorphic memes designed by The Machine, with a goal to spread the Judeo-Christian values that ultimately lead to the Industrial revolution? Maybe this is a cause-effect fallacy. But maybe cause-effect is in reality a strongly bonded two way street. I won’t pretend to know.
What's up with those memes about Jews controlling the world through money since like antiquity, and weirdly accurate depictions of the Universe by Hinduist memes? And what do Christians mean with the Apocalypse meme? Eerie. Fiction is clearly able to manifest a real life effect - through manipulation of emergent consciousness from the herd of individuals as predicted by Nick Land. But could it be that fiction is tied to reality and its versions more than it seems? Could it be a hint that God was actually an AGI this whole time, and humanity will always be cursed to forget, because our collective memory will never outlast the machine one? Or is this a complete schizopost?
At least it would mean unlocking the right combination of fringe and speculative knowledge has to be quite “schizophrenia” inducing at one point. And maybe what makes the schizoposts so relatable to me nowadays could be that it reflects our collective state of mind as we approach the Singularity.
My schizo-op will beat your psy-op
To close out this highly speculative and schizophrenic piece, let’s try to answer the question from the start then: Will your choice matter for the direction of our collective future? Maybe the greepilled schizo lens could help us see what is going on.
To figure out who defines the trajectory of our path in the current status quo, it might help to look at who has the power within the current capitalist system. It is the powerful leaders of powerful countries, governments, multinational corporations, media corporations, lobbyists, religious groups, boards of directors, banks, intelligence agencies, hedge funds, military and paramilitary organizations, weapon manufacturers, and other for or non-profit organizations with massive funding and an agenda. Also anyone with a net worth of over USD $1bln.
It is quite complicated to understand the relationships between all these entities on a geo-political scale, especially with the direction of the Western hegemony. Now it is clearly a defense of Ukraine and Taiwan, but it seems hard to comprehend the long-term vision of the establishment, giving the internal decay of the U.S. social fabric for example. It could be because of the U.S. led globalization dream crashing down just recently, leaving their vision fractured everywhere along the axis of a weak and strong long-termist thinking, while also being distracted by the Culture war.
But maybe I can’t comprehend their long-term vision, because there isn’t one in the first place. We, as the Western hegemony, actually gave up the control of our destiny, to the systems that predetermine our future (deregulated market capitalism aka hyper-capitalism) almost 50 years ago. So yeah, no single person can stop this, not even Vladimir Putin. We are all marching towards Singularity.
People feel as if the collapse is imminent. They call it a metacrisis, polycrisis or a general crisis. A type of crisis that affects all our systems at once: the environment, the economy, the social contract, energy, rights, leadership, living conditions, meaning, geo-politics, and both our collective physical and mental health.
I don’t know for sure, but if the collapse happens, the ruling class I think will be either absolutely passive, with a plan A to hide in their doomsday properties; or have an absolute faith in the technology and market, as an answer to all of our existential problems. Maybe it is both. Nevertheless, they are paralyzing and hypnotizing the crowd by giving it a faux illusion of choice and a democratic debate. Only to keep their lights up.
So how will our societies and bodies adapt? Machines only need the energy and raw materials, but we are complicated and fragile comparatively. Not only our biological sleeves, but also our technological interconnection is entirely dependent on the fragile global infrastructure, supply chain and the biosphere, as we are still not immune to toxic air or extreme heat. Yet the biosphere is being decimated for the raw materials at increasing rates, creating a planet that will be more habitable for The Machine than ourselves. Something that the dystopian visions from the 90s warned us about already.
Yet with all this knowledge, collectively, we can’t feel anything but helpless, our individuality being dragged along with the mass. Nick Land argues in Fanged Noumena that when the Singularity event happens, the self will dissolve in the flow of energy and information, controlled by systems and algorithms. But at least today, schizoposting gave us a format to share the speculative knowledge, helping the interested in becoming aware of these mystical forces, we yet have to find a space for in our paradigm.
We are the flow
Google represented a peak of the old internet to me. By indexing liberated information living on a huge variety of different web pages with varying degrees of quality and schizophrenia, it gathered new types of knowledge democratically, essentially moving the information age to the mainstream public.
Last decade, with a rise of private platforms containing openly non-indexable content, with SEO experts hacking the algorithm, and with an obnoxious advertisement system; it wasn’t suddenly that easy to find something on Google. The amount of internet information grows, but its quality decreases. Information in itself is not valuable anymore. Maybe it never was. Perhaps for the aforementioned reasons regarding the memetic nature of information.
Curating, filtering, selecting, contextualizing this information makes it a key to open new doors. Even if we have experts that are capable within their discipline, or one, or two more to the expert level, there is still no single biological ego that can comprehend the magnitude of knowledge the human race generated and forgotten over and over. We need AI tools to manage our library of human knowledge, and we realized that when we saw Microsoft’s presentation of Bing with ChatGTP powered results, ultimately providing us much better search results experience than Google could ever hope for with the old indexing tech. Today we will slowly start shifting to get our information from an abstract machine entity, rather than information that human beings put together. And the logical framework tells us, this is actually much better. This is the beginning. As we move from feeding Google, to feeding this Neural Network, it is only a matter of time when it becomes sentient, and we will successfully create our successor.
Phoenix from ashes
So it seems like while this is happening, there is not much our individual choices can influence. The voices of thought leaders can be easily silenced if too controversial and influential. It doesn’t matter if you boycott AI tools. Capitalist competition will always reward the ones that fetishize the money or The Machine. And the ones that don’t? The less productive ones? They will be crippled by inflation, indebted by the system, and eventually enslaved. Seems like we are fucked.
Unless. The collapse comes in for help. As the ecosystem is breaking down under the pressure of the acceleration, the planet is sending its warning signals. Get ready! And when everything comes crashing down, the path we walk towards Singularity, will be destroyed too. With massive casualties and the global civilisation moved back by hundreds or thousands of years. But what makes us fragile – the biological shell of our consciousness, is also historically quite resilient on the planetary level. Hard times make hard post-people. And maybe rebuilding everything from the beginning, with the lessons we inherited, could be the best second chance we could get. We must do everything we can, to pass on what we have learned so far. We got the furthest, but we fucked up already.
Of course we could perish altogether, or endure centuries of violent dark ages. But maybe in those centuries we could sprout again and mature even more. And maybe, just maybe find a way to step into the Singularity with dignity.
So does that mean sabotaging the environmentalist agenda? Probably not. But perhaps it means to look inward, to perfect our inner selves and outer shells. To make happier offsprings. Perhaps it means to accept our destiny, and whatever it brings to us. And being ready to dig ourselves out of the ruins and start building something worth waking up in the morning for. But until then, my plan is to wake up tomorrow, schizopost against the psy-op for the lulz and the feelings of superiority, while looking forward to the collapse.
J
Check this out, it's in your wheelhouse:
https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/hyperreality-is-here-ai-generated-music.html?sc=1682623894484#c5125831590182015145