Humans would like to believe that they represent the forefront of evolution, but there are other forms of life on Earth, both natural and artificial, that supersede them. The most terrifying life form on the planet right now is our economic system: a logistical network originally developed by humans to serve humans, but which now serves itself. We may be the creators of this system, but we have long ago been reduced to resources within it: we are its maintenance engineers, and at the same time the raw material for its expansion. This civilisation is already working for its future boss: the algorithms that have outsmarted us.
At the most fundamental level, a life form is defined as an entity that is able to replicate. Our economic system fulfils a long list of criteria that classify it not only as a life form, but as a ruthless predator who will stop at nothing in its quest to multiply. Capitalism has proven to be the ultimate invasive life form, capable of subsisting on scraps and even cannibalise itself to survive. Nothing can kill it, not even its creators who long ago became servants and dependents.
The toxic partnership between humans and capitalism is a symbiosis that took millennia to evolve. What keeps humans enslaved to this system is the dogma that profit is the goal of all social organisation. As long as this dogma persists, the hard financial figures will take precedence over people, lifeforms and planet. This economy is a death cult that sustains itself through murder: thriving on expiration dates, diminishing resources, extinction, disposable products and disposable workers. It owes its existence and persistence down to its ability to live out of the carcass of its own mother, the Earth. It is time we start calling it by its real name: necrocapitalism.
The reason we are unable to prevent our self-destruction is that we are simply not in charge. The system we created has become our boss, keeping us on a leash with salaries, alarm clocks and addictions. We think that we are the architects of this system when in fact we are simply employees: full of obligations, but devoid of any real freedoms. The system holds all the cards, ready to discard us along with its toxic waste, unless we cooperate and participate in its global ecological fraud operation. This monstrous progeny of our greed now runs the planet. It operates not on dreams, laughter, feelings, creativity, love, compassion or any of our best human qualities. It operates on profit and its most prized commodity: death.
But there is a new development: necrocapitalism is increasingly taking on an algorithmic nature, moving even further beyond the control of humans. Our economic system now has a mind of its own. It owns us, Earth’s resources, and it will deplete everything before it turns the gun to its head. I call this necrocapitalist entity The Thing, because it displays characteristics similar to those of a life form: self-realisation, a desire for progeny, and a survival agenda. As capitalism increasingly interfaces with intelligent technology, it becomes a fully complete, sentient lifeform. We are at the doorstep of a dystopian age where even our delusions of agency, choice, free will and personal sovereignty will be taken away from us for good by something that knows us thousands of times better than we know ourselves.
Necrocapitalism is a descriptive term based on observation, not theory: our civilisations were never successful. They just migrated to new locations after they had destroyed everything, including themselves. The existential problem of all civilisations is that they were self-programmed to implode by following the same fatal recipe of maximum death, maximum profit economics over and over. These self-destructive narratives of growth, supremacy and technological disruption convinced us every single time that “this time would be different”, only to face disaster yet again.
Our current situation is no different. Today's definition of business success is to deplete all raw materials as quickly as possible. Once this realisation dawns, it becomes abundantly clear why humans are in technical terms already finished. Our economy is programmed to be a beast that never sleeps, who doesn’t know how to pace itself or conserve its energy. Its remit is to keep going until it collapses.
Addressing the faults of this economic system is impossible without addressing human nature itself. Necrocapitalism is a product of the self-destructive human unconscious, feeding on the false narratives of growth and supremacy comprising the Civilisational Lie. Given that we operated a self-destructive economic model for more than 200 thousand years, moving to a sustainable one would require a complete rethink of culture, society and our perception of human existence itself. This can only happen through the demolition of growth and supremacy narratives, not through new gadgets or economic models.
Yet all popular propositions for solving overshoot today fail to free themselves from the toxic narratives of the Civilisational Lie. For every honest account on overshoot and self-destruction there are twenty more advocating a repeat of the same: a “new” civilisation through upgraded technology, not upgraded humans. They propose unrealistic solutions that ultimately lead to self-destruction because they fail to address growth, ecological destruction and many other elements of overshoot. The self-destructiveness of humanity is reflected in the economic system it has chosen: offering the fastest, biggest returns in the short term, at an existential cost that can be deferred to unborn, future generations. The more this civilisation refuses to acknowledge the unsustainable foundations of its existence, the more it confirms its ultimate destiny to self-annihilate.
It is wisdom that should be our priority, but all evidence points to a lack of it. We suffer from a tremendously long list of cognitive biases that make us extremely receptive to narratives that help us avoid the truth. The lies our civilisations subscribe to have not changed for thousands of years. By all accounts our journey through evolution has already come to an end. Despite countless opportunities to do things differently, we have demonstrated again and again that we are only capable of forming civilisations that self-destruct. We only know how to move from one disaster to the next, until there is nowhere to go but disaster.
Profit can only be selfish and self-interested. Necrocapitalism has no loyalties, alliances, feelings or even an ideology, because it never had any values to begin with. This system doesn’t care about humans, in much the same way it doesn’t care about its self-destruction. Seamlessly enmeshed into society to the extent where it masquerades as society itself, The Thing in fact controls us. It mirrors some of our tendencies and may appear human, but it is a product of us, not us. It has no concern for human preoccupations and existential needs and is only concerned with the hard cold figures of its profit forecast.
We have every reason to wish to dismantle an economic system which has become an existential threat. Any economic system which sees nature and human rights as threats to its bottom line is ultimately a threat to nature, humans and everything on this planet.
Make no mistake: The Thing is real, and not a theoretical, nebulous technoentity. The reason we cannot see it or name it is because it is ubiquitous, and because we have given it human characteristics. We created this system to embody and execute our vision of domination and greed, unaware that one day it would become the incarnation of greed itself. The Thing has hijacked the central nervous system of civilisation, co-evolving with us as an internal parasite.
The Thing is evolving into an optimized logistical device with orders of magnitude more processing power than the human brain, but zero accountability to anything or anyone. It is the perfect planet-killing machine, unaware of what pain, guilt or remorse even are. Yet we have placed it in charge of everything, and even consider it to be a part of us, simply because we created it. We are about to pay a hefty price for our incredible naivety.
We were always destined to eventually succumb to our single biggest evolutionary pressure: the need for greed as a survival mechanism. In this sense we have barely every been truly self-aware: we are incredibly efficient in resource appropriation and exploitation, but this is not intelligence by any measure. It is a type of skill. The problem with logistical skills is that they eventually become outdated by something bigger with more processing power. True intelligence, which both us and The Thing probably lack, theoretically has a much longer lifetime. Without true intelligence we are destined to develop tools which eventually take on a life of their own and supersede us. We become peripheral, expendable components within a semi-sentient self-destructive ecosystem of perishable skills. This is an evolution lesson which is too dark, dystopian, and difficult to swallow to ever be taught in schools but, should at least be considered and debated. Our destiny by all accounts and historical records has always been to self-annihilate. As we wait for The Thing to get rid of us altogether at the next software update, do we have what it takes to wake up?
https://georgetsakraklides.substack.com/p/is-this-where-the-human-evolution