/lit/ - Literature

it seems to me as if the technocapital singularity screws with us because it sucks politics, economics and religion into an atom-smasher. in one of the other threads an anon posted a hypothetical political compass that made sense:

>top-left: amy
>bottom-left: sadie
>top-right: reza
>bottom-right: nick

i'd agree with this too. there's a yin-yang gravity system to left/right politics that is kind of amazing to think about. in theory, things should be able to get along, but human beings are what they are. in China, there's no Decisive Battle between Laozi/Zhuangzi and Confucius/Mencius; they form two aspects of the same process, and when they have a conversation (even if it is written by the Taoists) everybody seems to get along. in the West we're still reeling from the French revolution, Industrial revolution, and WW2, which is almost like the Atheist revolution. the Cold War extended our old political narrative right up to the end of the 20C, and the US has dominated the world stage up until today, where now these deep schisms appear in its own Left/Right wings.

you can see why Moldbug would think the divine right of kings would make sense. if you formalize every aspect of government, make everyone a citizen/shareholder in a microstate wired for profit and nothing else, you dissolve some of the power of universalist metapolitics in a stroke. but you don't solve for growth: and, indeed, as much as i would like to see the US political system busted up into a diaspora of tiny and fractious microparties, the fact is that a huge organization with an awesome media budget and central planning might do even better if they *didn't* fold up shop ('See? look at those other guys, they don't know what they want...').

and so Optimize for Intelligence - which means finance, machines et al - does make sense. it just leads to a very crazy and destabilized place in which to do so. an infinite bureaucracy, China-style, with a legalist OS (as>>12009081's post indicates). Legalism in general seems like it would dovetail well with game theory and AI stuff also.

politics just has no trajectory anymore, it seems, beyond CTRL. maybe that is what happens inevitably when you run out of new markets, or what marketization was always aimed at. if what you manufacture is Culture, you get incredible cross-overs. apparently this ad was worth 6 billion dollars. conversely, Trump can tweet that Corn Puffs aren't MAGA, and for hundreds of thousands of his followers, into the trash it goes.

but it's all just simulation, political mimesis. when it comes to our drives, we're just such *suckers.*