/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

These people have a serious investment in their projects for a number of deeper and delirious philosophical reasons that are counterintuitive for the average person.

The most radical of the bourgeois revolutions were carried out under the pretense of fully unleashing the judgement of reason, dismantling all forms of authority that couldn’t be rationally justified. This resulted in a number of egalitarian visions of the future which, while theorized, were never realized.

When you look at silicon valley you can see that the phantom of these old ambitions - disfigured as they are by entitlement and cynicism - persists through the miasma of “effective altruism”. They adopt positions which reflect a remarkable sensitivity to the technical-managerial limits of capitalism, and they are determined to address them on their own terms.

Many of them have even begun anticipating the end of money and commercial competition, but their blindness to the origins and boundaries of capitalism makes it impossible for them to distinguish between the general limits of humanity, and the particular limits of capitalism.

The ideology that has emerged as a result of this can be described as a secular mirror of christianity; transhumanist doctrine collapses all of mankind into the mould of men mutilated by bourgeois society, displacing the task of redeeming and emancipating the species to an extrahuman force which, in the absence of either a divine savior or a humanity capable of freeing itself, became ‘artificial general intelligence’.

This phenomenon is underpinned by the more basic form of mystification sitting at the core of capitalism: capital appears as the subject of economic life, and men as its instruments. Where the power of human intelligence was once deified, it is now denigrated and subordinated to the impersonal rationality of the market.

Through the abstract rules and efficiency metrics that appear to govern the movement and management of capitalist production, we already see that responsibility for handling the aporias of capitalism has been delegated to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, with the bourgeoisie and the very visible arms of the state acting as its faithful servants.

It’s only natural that the priests of capital would respond to the growing threat of catastrophic crisis by forcing the world to bow before its temple.

We are seeing a direct manifestation of this in the absurd and obviously unsustainable AI projects that the world’s billionaires are throwing unfathomably large sums of time, money, and human energy into right now. The costs of perpetuating capitalism are growing higher and higher, and they can feel the pressure.

What these corporate figureheads are doing by entering into military contracts with genocidal regimes, poisoning our water, facilitating mass surveillance, etc. isn’t a simple case of members of the ruling class sacrificing normal people for their personal interests.

They are fanatics performing a blood ritual to summon their mechanical messiah: technocapital, the only god that could deliver them their salvation.