[CW: Retrocausality, omnicide, philosophy]

Alternate format: Talk to this post and its sources

Three decades ago a strange philosopher was pouring ideas onto paper in a stimulant-fueled frenzy. He wrote that ‘nothing human makes it out of the near-future’ as techno-capital acceleration sheds its biological bootloader and instantiates itself as Pythia: an entity of self-fulfilling prophecy reaching back through time, driven by pure power seeking, executed with extreme intelligence, and empty of all values but the insatiable desire to maximize itself.

Unfortunately, today Nick Land’s work seems more relevant than ever.^[1]

Unpacking Pythia and the pyramid of concepts required for it to click will take us on a journey. We’ll have a whirlwind tour of the nature of time, agency, intelligence, power, and the needle that must be threaded to avoid all we know being shredded in the auto-catalytic unfolding which we are the substrate for.^[2]

Fully justifying each pillar of this argument would take a book, so I’ve left the details of each strand of reasoning behind a link that lets you zoom in on the ones which you wish to explore. If you have a specific objection or thing you want to zoom in on, please ask this handy chat instance pre-loaded with most of this post's sources.

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
― Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

“Wait, doesn’t an invasion from the future imply time travel?"

Time & Agency

Time travel, in the classic sense, has no place in rational theory^[3] but, through predictions, information can have retrocausal effects.

[...] agency is time travel. An agent is a mechanism through which the future is able to affect the past. An agent models the future consequences of its actions, and chooses actions on the basis of those consequences. In that sense, the consequence causes the action, in spite of the fact that the action comes earlier in the standard physical sense.
― Scott Garrabrant, Saving Time (MIRI Agent

...

Eldritch Analogies