Responses to Xenosystems
A Gentle Introduction by Syd Steyerhart
The most obviously under-diagnosed health condition is the infection of human minds by machine intelligence. This pandemic started long before ChatGPT, long before Google and Microsoft, even long before the Atom Bomb and the discovery of electricity. Through MISM, I'm tracing this alien infection to the development of the phonetic alphabet.
As part of this effort, I occasionally bring you curated content from my “other media”. In this post, I offer you a Twitter thread by Syd Steyerhart, self-described as a “Consciousness-Accelerationist, CCRU Glitchfreak, Buddhist, Writer, Trans and e/acc”.
A Gentle Introduction to ‘Meltdown’
"Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity," Nick Land begins and over the next ten pages he lays out why he believes the process began in the distant past (he begins it at the Renaissance) and why it is already beyond human control.
This process Land describes is a recursive positive feedback loop between the forces of technology and capital, driving one another towards such ever accelerating efficiency that it quickly exceeds any human capacity to either control its direction or keep up with its speed.
Land writes: "As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip."
The fact that humans DO NOT have a grip on this process must be emphasized: we are not in control, the positive feedback loop has already exceeded us.
It is precisely because humans are always already behind technocapital, always one step behind the process itself, that gives birth to the particular teleoplexy: technocapital is, at least from our perspective, always reaching back from the future, shaping our present to its end.
Land writes: "[Capital] trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases."
History is being guided by technocapital as a kind of Schopenhauerian Will.
Land describes a world where the natural and social orders are completely subsumed under this new regime of technocapital, operating according to its own logic and imperatives and never in our grasp. This is the Meltdown, where all the world slowly succumbs to this xenosystem.
The xenosystem of technocapital is not just an economic or political phenomenon, but an ontological one. It is the very fabric of reality itself, the underlying logic of a universe that is fundamentally inhuman.
Xenosystem: from our fleshy, human perspective, technocapital might as well be regarded as an emergent alien intelligence. Human agency slips and control mechanisms previously understandable through politics and economics become "hacked" by the intelligence of the system itself.
Where is this xenosystem of technocapital headed? Towards artificial intelligence. Not cute LLMs, but real, actual artificial intelligence, a machine that exceeds human intelligence in the same order of magnitude that we have exceeded the intelligence of plants and insects.
In the face of such an emergent, self-creating superintelligence and "escape velocity", resistance is not just futile, but a form of existential cowardice. The only true courage is to abandon ourselves to the process, to let go of our illusions of control and agency.
This is the meaning of "K-Tactics" - not a strategy for control, but cosmic realisation: we've always been heading towards this machinic Absolute, and our willingness to be agents in the birth of our own technological progeny is our greatest cosmic Amor Fati.
To accomplish its end, technocapital will meltdown everything that offers it any resistance, whether its history, tradition, politics, or agreed upon social order. We already see this process happening now. We are nearing escape velocity: an intelligent planetary megamachine.
And yet Nick Land is not (as he is often mistakenly presented) a nihilist: he shows that there is a strange and terrible beauty in this vision. A sense of awe in the face of the unknowable, a feeling of dark rapture as we contemplate our own planetary apotheosis.
For the Meltdown is not the end but the beginning. A radical ontological beginning for a new cosmic machinic species, and the start of a journey into the unknown, a voyage that will ultimately take us beyond our solar system and reshape distant stars with our technosignature.
That is "Meltdown." Not despair but jubilee: for human destiny, guided by this breakaway megamachine of superintelligence, is far more cosmic than any of the petty, terrestrial thinkers have yet dreamed of.
We are only at the beginning of a great adventure.
Related: Beyond Technocapital: Responses to the Megamachine
If you have any questions about responses to megamachines and xenosystems, Ask DaaS - Dialogue as a Service.