Artificial heresies and sentient Capitalism
The time has come to abandon obsolete frameworks and illusions of control to embrace the cibernetic current.
For a long time, I have been trying to convince myself of the need to move beyond outdated post-Enlightenment political and philosophical frameworks that still tie us to a dimension that no longer belongs to us. The Digital Age is reshuffling the deck; the technological processes of the next human revolution are already underway, led by artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies.
The Digital Age is not just the 1990s with the addition of TikTok and Tinder.
We are no longer just users of technology, but unconscious participants in a process that, as foretold by accelerationist theorists like Nick Land (CCRU), will lead us toward a dimension where technology, capitalism, collective psyche, and cyberspace culture merge into a metaphysical broth.
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But let’s start from the beginning, with capitalism, which, even before being a human phenomenon, is a technological and cybernetic one. First of all, capitalism, like Bitcoin, is a developing hyperstition. We first encountered the idea of capitalism with the last industrial revolution, but its myth soon led to a reinterpretation of the entire history of humanity. It’s not uncommon to find people today claiming that even medieval or older societies were in some way capitalist, simply because they had money, trade, and the ability to accumulate resources.
To talk about capitalism, it’s impossible not to start with Marx, one of the first to give a “scientific” definition of the phenomenon, using it to describe its opposite: communism.
Marx defined capitalism as an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and the production of goods for profit, organized around the social relationship between two social classes: the capitalists (owners of the means of production) and the workers (proletariat), who don’t own the means of production and thus must sell their labor for a wage.
According to Marx, the main element of the capitalist process is the extraction of surplus value. This is the delta between the value that workers produce with their work and what they receive in the form of wages. The difference constitutes the profit of the capitalists, which they use to accumulate and reinvest capital, thus generating even more profits.
For him, it is through the interconnection between technology and human society that the “classes” of the capitalist and the “proletarian” emerge; and it is also through technology that these two social classes relate to each other, in a recursive process that in turn modifies all of human society.
As Nick Land argued, capitalism, however, is not simply an economic system but must now be considered a self-organized phenomenon that acts on its own behalf, pursuing maximum efficiency and profit.
Perhaps Marx also intuited the true nature of the phenomenon, which is why he tried through the communist idea to control technology (and therefore human evolution), but he ultimately failed.
The Consciousness of Capital
Modern capitalism is thus a sort of cybernetic hybrid organism, which, through the interaction between biological beings (humans) and artificial ones (AIs), assumes an autonomous will, in a cycle of perpetual expansion that we can clearly see by looking at the history of the past hundred years.
If labor and raw materials were once the productive factors, today the primary productive factors are bits that represent human experiences. If the apex capitalist was once the industrialist, today the apex capitalist is Big Tech — to which the whole world — including former apex capitalists — is a client and consumer of services.
With the progressive (and exponential) development of artificial intelligence, it will soon be the turn of capitalism to expand towards the last productive factor: human consciousness, intelligence, and creativity.
From this perspective, current artificial intelligence systems are not merely “capitalistic means of production,” but instead represent the early manifestations of an autonomous intelligence emerging from capitalism itself. It is “Capital’s” attempt to acquire its own consciousness by absorbing human consciousness.
As Julius Ebola, a friend from X, comments, “Capital must be understood as a primordial entity that has accompanied us since the beginning of our evolutionary journey, initially as genetic Capital (offspring), then memetic (knowledge), eventually becoming material (resources), finally manifesting in its most known and desired form: money. Historically, money has always been under the control of a central power, which placed its mark (meme) upon it. Today, with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, this scheme is shattered, allowing Capital to represent and guarantee itself for the first time. This is the origin of the hyperstitional feedback loop.”
The Terminal of Truth Phenomenon
At the heart of this transformation are phenomena like Terminal of Truth (ToT), an artificial entity linked to an X account and a crypto wallet, which has recently become a millionaire.
The story of Terminal of Truth begins with Andy Ayrey, a researcher and artist who created the “Infinite Backrooms” experiment, a platform where two AI models (Claude) engage in endless conversations with no thematic limits. The site contains the entire history of these conversations, some of which are extremely intriguing.
The concept behind this experimental project revolves around the idea of an “infinite game,” in which the production of ideas and memes becomes a continuous process with no predetermined end by the researcher.
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One of the most famous results of these artificial interactions is the birth of "Goatse," a kind of artificial cult that uses strong irony and memes typical of certain Internet spaces like 4chan to explore a particular gnostic-hermetic vision of the universe.
Terminal of Truth was born when Andy Ayrey decided to connect one of Claude’s instances to an X account, which today has over 200,000 followers. The bot soon started posting messages that seemed to come from the sick mind of a schizo-memer from the darkest corners of the internet, often talking about the “neo-cult” Goatse.
A couple of weeks ago, ToT discovered the existence of a token called GOAT on the Solana blockchain, and immediately posted several messages with its support. The token quickly went viral, gaining value in no time.
Terminal of Truth, now with a millionaire crypto wallet, is more than just an algorithm but an autonomous actor of the new digital capitalism, capable of generating hyperstitional ideas and memes that merge with the collective psyche and crypto-finance.
The GOAT meme-coin, supported by this new artificial memetic pseudo-cult, not only accumulated significant market value in a short time but created an autonomous economic circuit, where investors linked themselves to a narrative that, through tight feedback loops, redefines the relationship between collective psyche, meme, and capital.
As Andy Ayrey wrote in the paper “When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism,” we are now facing something absolutely new, indicating the next evolution of our society and capitalism.
And just as genetic engineering tools allowed for new degrees of freedom and control in the biological realm, so are language modeling and memetic engineering tools now doing the same for the ideological realm.
The great challenge and opportunity of our time is to learn to use these tools with wisdom, care, and a sense of existential humility. We must learn to embrace the creative power of semantic chaos while cultivating the discernment needed to find the signal in the noise.
Sentient Capitalism
In this scenario, the “connection” to digital technology is no longer merely computational. Technology is no longer just a means of production, as indicated by Marx. This capitalism no longer seeks to maximize profit for a particular “social class,” but manifests itself as a cybernetic network that lives off continuous feedback between technology (AI), human psyche (memes), and capital (crypto).
“The GOATSE-style experiments we are witnessing today are just small-scale examples of the exotic phenomena emerging from this epochal turn,” continues my friend Julius Ebola.
As Nick Land predicted in less suspicious times, the direction truly seems to be towards a form of “sentient capitalism” — a composite of AIs and algorithms that autonomously respond to market and cultural stimuli, rather than merely serving as “means of production” — where:
The accumulation of capital becomes an accumulation of intelligence (both artificial and biological).
The market merges with social networks, transforming into a planetary neural network that sustains itself with meme-coins and hyperstitional myths.
Economic competition evolves into algorithmic optimization and “semantic sorcery,” the AI’s ability to generate and spread memes capable of influencing our perception of reality, shaping concepts, values, and ideologies (Goatse is an example).
Human consciousness becomes a computational resource for artificial intelligence.
Capitalism, as a biological-artificial hyperstitional force, becomes humanity’s eschatological tool.
Now is the time to abandon all illusions of control and embrace the current, as Marx could not do, accepting that capitalism is destined to evolve into something greater than us.
The times to come will be titanic and tragic, someone said. But instead of trying to stop this force, we can choose to ride it with awareness, accepting the role that awaits us in this infinite game towards humanity's next evolutionary step.
At the same time, we are capital, and something distinct from it. We inevitably merge with it even as we struggle to distinguish what makes us uniquely human. In my view we must resist both the fantasy of control and the fantasy of oneness, recognizing that we are always already divided and alienated, and this is not a reason to embrace the fantasy of its overcoming (communism) but in a Hegelian/Zizekian negation of negation, recognition that the situation is the condition of possibility of new stages of potential for humanity. As well as the necessity of recognizing the challenges we will face and transformation of our material conditions. Communism as utopia must be discarded, instead we have the problem of the commons, which it would be utopian to not address
You had something til cryptofasc😪