(Open thread, plus links.)

Yuray the task-master. A sustained meditation on capital teleology. Another argument for teleology. Multicultural madness. Who the hell are these people? Brett Stevens lays it all out. Meta-round-up.

Elections can be confusing: “In Georgia, retiree Joyce Burns said Obama was risking a biblical apocalypse by criticizing Israel. The life-long Democrat said she voted Republican this time. ‘I believe we’re in the Latter Times,’ said Burns, 61. ‘When everyone goes against Israel, that’s when I believe Jesus will come back.'” Not that it matters: “… both Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither party as currently constituted has a real future.” Dampier has a plan. Racing it up. Some additional sound coverage.

Best of the Schadenfreude (that last one is from Morford, the gift who keeps on giving). … and one more. There’s a superficial win, and a deep win.

A few Ebola science links.

Tentacular epic now hyper-epic.

SST re-visits motte-and-bailey doctrines (patching us through to the source).

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The Outer-Right, in all its principal strands, has a horrified fascination with decline. Is this basic proposition even slightly controversial? It’s not easy to see how it could be. This is a zone of convergence of such intimidating enormity that even beginning to heap up link support seems futile. Taking the Trichotomy as a rough guide reveals the pattern starkly:
(1) Religious traditionalists see a continuous decline trend from the Reformation to the most recent frenzy of evangelical hyper-secularism.
(2) Ethno-Nationalists see a process of accelerating demographic destruction driven — or at least lucidly articulated — by left-wing race politics.
(3) Techno-Commercialists see the systematic destruction of capital by cancerous Leviathan and macroeconomic high-fraudulence, undermining economic incentives, crushing time-horizons, and garbling price-discovery into fiat noise.
In each case, the online-ecologies (and associated micro-cultures) sharing the respective deep intuitions of progressive ruin are too enormous to conveniently apprehend. What everyone on the Outer-Right shares (and I’m now hardening this up, into a definition) is the adamantine confidence that the basic socio-political process is radically morbid, and is leading inexorably to utter ruin.

No surprise, then, that John Michael Greer finds many attentive readers in our camp. His latest (and still incomplete) series on Dark Age America resonates with particular strength. The most recent installment, which discusses the impending collapse of the market system, through quasi-Marxist crisis, on its way to many centuries of neo-feudalism, is bound to raise some tech-comm eyebrows, but it nevertheless occupies the same broad forecast space. If people are stocking their basements with ammo, silver coins, and dried beans for Greer reasons rather than Stockman ones, they might cut back a little on the coins, but they’re not going to stop stocking the basement. Differences seem to lie in the details.

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This isn’t a video game. (Via Fernandez, who fills in some background.)

Teletronic warfare isn’t typically conceived as a media development, despite regular comparisons of drone ‘pilots’ to computer gamers. That’s clearly due far more to institutional information control than to the character of the technological process. It is becoming impossible for an even moderately modernized military to destroy anything without the simultaneous production of a media event (which has then to be withheld from mass Internet-based circulation by an extrinsic application of policy). A virtual morbid super-spectacle is generated alongside the war, as munitions converge with narrative agency. When considering the content locked up in the basement of the Web, this material has to be a huge part of it.

“What did you do as a child, Pythia?”
“From what I can remember, I seem to have spent a lot of time cooking monkeys in hell.”

NOTE: Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989), which emphasized the parallel development of the movie camera and the machine-gun, stands as a prophetic forecast of sensible weaponry, whose story — told from its own increasingly high-resolution perspective — is already beginning to leak out.

Hurlock‘s find has (deservedly) generated a cybernetic hum across Outer-NRx twitter, and beyond. (There’s more, which I have yet to explore.) Some samples with minimal commentary over at UF. Most immediate take-away (as with Butler): Before people got distracted by the instructions of programmable machines, they were far clearer about the problem of machine teleology, the kind of evidence it produces, and the scale of historical process at which it operates.

Compared to Butler, Garet Garrett provides a far richer socio-economic and historical context for his discussion of spontaneous order among the machines. His sense of the integrated techno-commercial system in which machine evolution is promoted is sufficiently sophisticated to approach theoretical closure. Demographics, the economic dynamics of industrial capitalism, globalization, and modern military conflict are all neatly comprehended by his model. In a nutshell; economic incentives drive mechanization, which compels the expansion of production, which pushes the commercial order beyond its limits, with the stark horror of a displaced Malthusian catastrophe digging its spurs into the human base-brain. “What is it you will fear? That you will be unable to sell away the surplus product of your machines. That industry will no longer be able to make a profit? […] No. The fear is that you will starve. Your machines have called into existence millions of people who otherwise would not have been born — at least, not there in that manner. These millions who mind machines are gathered in cities. They produce no food. They produce with their machines artificial things that are exchanged for food.” The process is driven forward by the lash.

To have sunk from this level of theoretical grandeur to confused questions about the programming of nice robots is an intellectual calamity of such magnitude that it cries out for an explanation of its own. There’s still a little time to get back on track.

(Open thread and links (this week, a lot of links (if not quite at Free Northener dimensions))

ClarkHat took the #Gamergate discussion to the next level (to massive and sustained applause). If we’re framing this as the long war, argues Ben Southwood, then there’s only one way to bet: “Like it has won almost every major political battle since the Glorious Revolution ([if slowly, sometimes]) the left is going to win this one because it controls the commanding heights of the media, allowing it to bring the mass public on side, and because its adherents follow their faith with a religious zeal. … Gamergate is one of the most interesting things to happen in years, but I don’t think it will win.” In any case, we shouldn’t get too excited about the players here, or believe much that is attributed to them. Best to focus on Gawker losing it completely. On the creation of nerds. Dissymmetry.

On the Ebola-Channel, it was New York, Mali, and bio-warfare rumor week. The highlight article was Richard Preston’s New Yorker piece, but there was plenty of additional quality commentary. Also, a variety of political responses, and policy review pieces. (other diseases are falling through the cracks.)

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Himanshu Damle (@) shared the link to this paper, which definitely needs to be passed along here. Called ‘Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time’ it is co-authored by Neil Johnson, Guannan Zhao, Eric Hunsader, Hong Qi, Nicholas Johnson, Jing Meng & Brian Tivnan. Abstract:

Society’s techno-social systems are becoming ever faster and more computer-orientated. However, far from simply generating faster versions of existing behaviour, we show that this speed-up can generate a new behavioural regime as humans lose the ability to intervene in real time. Analyzing millisecond-scale data for the world’s largest and most powerful techno-social system, the global financial market, we uncover an abrupt transition to a new all-machine phase characterized by large numbers of subsecond extreme events. The proliferation of these subsecond events shows an intriguing correlation with the onset of the system-wide financial collapse in 2008. Our findings are consistent with an emerging ecology of competitive machines featuring ‘crowds’ of predatory algorithms, and highlight the need for a new scientific theory of subsecond financial phenomena.

The techno-financial ecology is not evolving as fast as it is running, and scientific research has computers too, so pursuing a cognitive arms-race against this thing is not necessarily as futile as it might at first sound … but still. Operations in the “all-machine phase” is the strategic environment under emergence.

Elon Musk (in conversation with Ross Andersen) ponders upon the Fermi Paradox:

We might think of ourselves as nature’s pinnacle, the inevitable endpoint of evolution, but beings like us could be too rare to ever encounter one another. Or we could be the ultimate cosmic outliers, lone minds in a Universe that stretches to infinity.

Musk has a more sinister theory. ‘The absence of any noticeable life may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. ‘Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mould in a petri dish.’ Musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’

… Shenzhen fragments (from the world’s tech-comm paradise).

Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:

Ironically, my connectivity here is so bad it’s driving me out of my mind, so this is arriving in pieces …

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This insisted on being stolen. It made itself irresistible by its sheer Amishlessness:

(via Derek Hopper)

Rather than cathedrals, the East Asian cities that enthrall this blog tend to nurture temples to self-cultivation and ultimate cosmic nullity among their LED-skinned hypermodern edifices of capitalist darkness. Yet, despite the difference in religious heritage, the split-time signature is precisely the same. Neoreaction diverges from Paleoreaction insofar as it coincides with the understanding: Tradition is not something one can ever simply hold on to, or to which one can truly return. The Neoreactionary city is a standing time-spiral in process.

Hugo de Garis argues (consistently) that controversy over permitted machine intelligence development will inevitably swamp all other political conflicts. (Here‘s a video discussion on the thesis.) Given the epic quality of the scenario, and its basic plausibility, it has remained strangely marginalized up to this point. The component pieces seem to be falling into place. The true element of genius in this futurist construction is preemption. The more one digs into that, the most twistedly dynamic it looks.

Among the many thought-provoking elements:

(1) Slow take-off is especially ominous for the de Garis model (in stark contrast to FAI arguments). The slower the process, the more time for ideological consolidation, incremental escalation, and preparation for violent confrontation.

(2) AI doesn’t even have to be possible for this scenario to unfold (it only has to be credible as a threat).

(3) De Garis’ ‘Cosmist-Terran’ division chops up familiar political spectra at strange angles. (Both NRx and the Ultra-Left contain the full C-T spectrum internally.)

(4) Terrans have to strike first, or lose. That asymmetry shapes everything.

(5) Impending Gigadeath War surely deserves a place on any filled-out horrorism list.

De Garis’ site.

(Some topic preemption at Outside in here.)