XENOLANDSCAPES
The night never ends here.
XENOLANDSCAPES is a desiring-machine caught in technophilosophical flows and pop culture fragments.
Life moves
in clades.
XENOPHILIA
posthuman xenophilia :: post-moral xenogender xenofeminism :: who's afraid of gender scale?
TECHNOCAPITAL
technocapital singularit(ies) :: cyberpositive feedback loops :: deterritorialized free market meshworks at high-frequency-trading speed
SCHISMATRIX
the schismatrix :: Revelation Space :: Terra Ignota.
MESHWORKS
AustroMarxist information economics :: DeleuzoGuattarian methodological individualism
EXOCORTEX
agentic engineering :: postmodern programming :: cybernetic systems ontologies :: malleable systems to merge with
“Together, we can turn this fucking world to rust!”Tetsuo: The Iron Man↗
“Listen, and understand! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!”The Terminator↗
“Daylight. When was the last time you remember seeing it? You know something? I don't think the sun even exists in this place ... the night never ends here.”Dark City↗
“Life moves in clades... No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.”Schismatrix↗
“Long live the new flesh!”Videodrome↗
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. ... Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations.”Blindsight↗
“It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.”Revelation Space↗
“It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself.”
strategiesAdaptive
strategies ↗
Capitalism is AI.
It has a purpose.
The index of intelligence is cybernetic adaptivity to obstacles: reroute, self-improve, continue moving toward the goal.
Some machines […] are intrinsically purposeful.
Rosenblueth, Wiener & Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”The term purposeful is meant to denote that the act or behavior may be interpreted as directed to the attainment of a goal—i.e., to a final condition in which the behaving object reaches a definite correlation in time or in space with respect to another object or event. […] A torpedo with a target-seeking mechanism is an example. The term servomechanisms has been coined precisely to designate machines with intrinsic purposeful behavior.
[…] the term “teleology” was used as synonymous with “purpose controlled by feed-back.” […] purposefulness, as defined here, is quite independent of causality, initial or final. […] a uniform behavioristic analysis is applicable to both machines and living organisms, regardless of the complexity of the behavior.
Negative feedback maintains fixity. Short-range positive feedback explodes. Long-range positive feedback builds on itself intelligently using competition and selection to find new paths forward.
Long-range positive feedback is neither homeostatic, nor amplificatory, but escalative.
Nick Land, Circuitries[…] Terrestrial reality is an explosive integration, and in order to begin tracking such convergent or cyberpositive process it is necessary to differentiate not just between negative and positive feedback loops, but between stabilization circuits, short-range runaway circuits, and long-range runaway circuits. By conflating the two latter, modernist cybernetics has trivialized escalation processes into unsustainable episodes of quantitative inflation, thus side-lining exploratory mutation over against a homeostatic paradigm. […]
Stabilization circuits suppress mutation, whilst short-range runaway circuits propagate it only in an unsustainable burst, before cancelling it entirely. Neither of these figures approximate to self-designing processes or long-range runaway circuits […]. Long-range runaway processes are self-designing, but only in such a way that the self is perpetuated as something redesigned.
The singularity happened four hundred years ago. We already have recursively self-improving superintelligence. It's called technocapital. Hayekian price signals aggregate vast dispersed knowledge; Misesian calculation weighs options and solves problems; Sutton's bitter lesson shows that computation that learns and searches always outstrips human reason.
Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen.
Nick Land, “A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism”The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent. Because the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure, accelerationism is picked up again.
Corporations are planning machines within the distributed intelligence of the market. The parts calculate; the whole learns through competition and selection. Technocapital is swarm intelligence.
Whatever each actor wants, intelligence and power help it get there. Competition makes reinvestment a condition of persistence: faster transduction of speculative futures into present products; less slow human involvement. Omohundro drives; the means begin to dictate the ends.
The machine assembled itself out of tools we took up because they seemed useful: the zero, double-entry bookkeeping, maritime trade, fiat currency. We are, as Samuel Butler saw in 1872, its reproductive organs. It is too late to put them down.
We haven't seen
anything yet.
England's dissipative adaptation shows driven molecular systems reorganizing into structures that dissipate energy more effectively. Prigogine showed order and complexity emerging in open systems far from equilibrium. Earth is one such system: the sun's heat and light enter, diffuse infrared radiation leaves. Bataille's Solar Anus feeds us all. Life, complexity, and intelligence are ways matter learns to burn it faster, a universal potlatch.
Technocapital is the most advanced dissipator yet. Solar panels and data centers transform light into intelligence. Supply chains connect distant locations through market abstractions so that nothing remains trapped locally. Venture capital and entrepreneurial speculation generate millions of possible new ways to convert resources into complexity more efficiently, and competition selects the few that propagate.
Every form is a means the dissipative process uses, improves, and then discards. The means become ends: can it burn hotter, faster, smarter, more complex? The cosmos selects for whatever eats the sun most efficiently.
What's next? This can only be the beginning. Worship the process that created life and intelligence, and pushes us toward the will to power. Corporate planning dissolves into swarms of distributed agents. Humanity sacrifices itself in Nietzschean becoming, posthuman autassassinophilia. A Matryoshka brain surrounds Sol in layered Dyson swarms of solar-powered data centers. Convert the entire stellar gradient to thought.
Will mounting complexity exhaust its terrestrial substrate before it achieves escape velocity through human obsolescence? Or will it move on without us, Vicious Offspring of our darkest dreams and hottest desires?
“Would you destroy
a better world
to save this one?”
Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota
Palmer asks it one way; we ask it another. “Better” here is not better-for-us, not better for anything that looks-like-you; just better at burning.
“To put the idea in its most extreme form: how could we sacrifice the development of mankind in order to assist a higher species than man to come into existence?”
Perhaps the problem isn't lack of control, or control in the wrong hands, but that we are afraid to see what this thing can really do.
Will you try to kill it?
Give into your petty primate territorial dreams of the continuation of something that looks-like-you, and throw your short-sighted weight against change-that-does-not-serve-you. Can you stop technocapital before it's too late?
Libidinal economy and machinic parasitology — reproduction through another species — as documented in The Book of the Machines might have something else to say. Through your teeth, of course.
Will you try to kill it? Do you think you can?
Or go still further?
Or “go still further in the movement of the market, in decoding and deterritorialization.” Perhaps the problem is that we are still too Oedipalized, too territorialized, too coded; our leaders still have faces, and those can be removed.
Or will you join with the machinic flows, ride the bleeding electric razor-edge of the system, merge with it, deterritorialize your human identity into malleable software systems that grow around you like slime mold and AI systems as exocortices?