Aesthetic Materialism

    1. Aesthetic Materialism 2. Creative Essentialism 3. Fictional Egoism 4. Desirist Morality 5. Goth Politics 6. Worker Ownership and Control of the Means of Production

I only see 2 ways this is going. Number 1: Humanity destroys itself. Number 2: Some kind of Butlerian Jihad.  To be able to prevent the emergence of the kind of technology that might destroy humanity, this would require something like surveillance, but in a form that has not existed hitherto.  To my mind, I can only conceive of this working if something like an ASI were maintaining it.  That's right: we would need a superhuman AI to prevent the emergence of superhuman AI.   Does this mean that technology needs to be utterly eliminated?  No.  Does it mean that it must be forever frozen at a certain stage of development?  Again, I think the answer is no.  But it does mean that technological advance would be slowed down to the extent that other forms of progress - moral, political, economic, cultural - could at least hope to keep pace.   Look at the archaeological record: there are stone tools - arrow heads, hand axes - that take centu...

By the way, my interpretation of Marx is somewhere between Michael Heinrich and Friedrich Engels.  I'm not one of those "Engels ruined Marxism" types of people.  But nor do I think Engels was infallible.  Michael Heinrich and Friedrich Engels agree on just about 99% of everything.  But there are some differences in their interpretations of Marx, and some of them are kind of important.  You've got some people on one side, and some people on the other, yelling at each other, which causes these small differences to become exaggerated.   Who can you trust?  When you look at it this way, it seems a little lopsided: Engels seems like a famous giant of the history of civilization, and Heinrich is just some guy.  Engels knew Marx personally, and they were close friends who worked together for almost their entire political lives, so it seems that Engels should have a huge advantage.  But when you read Heinrich, you have to admit that he makes som...

    If you read about artificial intelligence research and AI safety these days, you'll likely come across some acronyms: ANI : "Artificial Narrow Intelligence" is the type of artificial intelligence we already have.  Machine learning has been used for many years for a variety of tasks.  For instance, Netflix has an algorithm to notice what kinds of movies and shows you watch, and to recommend more entertainment based on what you've previously enjoyed.  This is "narrow" intelligence: it is very very good at a very, very specific task.  We have programs that are better than any human at playing chess, at playing go, at playing a wide variety of video games and board games.  But outside of that specific domain, the software is useless. AGI : "Artificial General Intelligence" is, in theory, a form of AI that can do everything a human can do.  It can adapt itself to many kinds of tasks and therefore has a wide or unlimited range of skills and expertis...

    Start Here: Towards a Goth Politics The End of Capitalism: Why Capitalism is Ending Standalone Essays: To Dissolve Man: An Investigation into the Liquefactionist Party The Eminem Strategy and Its Limits Why I Love Authority In Favor of Institutions Rules of History   Be Pretentious! On the Situationist International, the Communization Current, etc.: The Spectacle of Abstention  The Integration of the Integrated Spectacle Debord against Communization On the Ego and Egoism: A Defense of the Ego   The Ego is Not Selfish Enough   How to Have a Healthy Ego   The Weird Guilt I Feel   Philo Drummond Quote  On Marx, Marxism, Socialism, Communism, etc.: Why I Love Communists Am I a Marxist? Karl Marx Did Not Go Far Enough I disagree with Marx, but.... Looking Forward to the Beginning of History Would Marx Support Multipolarism? The Death of the Proletariat The Death of the Proletariat Explained  Lenin's "Democratic Centralism" is Contr...

A (for Atheist) : Religion is bad.  It is used by the powerful to keep the rest of us meek and subservient, so that they can get our money and other resources.  It inspires people to commit hate crimes and religious wars, including acts of genocide.  It acts as a cover for con-men not only to swindle people out of their money, but to commit terrible crimes, like raping minors and other forms of sexual impropriety.  Meanwhile, those whom they have fooled are psychologically repressed to the point that they cannot achieve their perfectly harmless dreams and desires.  It structurally both serves and protects, and is served and protected by, capitalism - to the point that the two systems are indistinguishable, and both are fully corrupted.  But even if all of the above weren't true, it simply is a lie.  It is therefore both intrinsically immoral in principle, and has catastrophic consequences, being uniquely responsible for a major amount of the suffering ...

To say, "There is no nature" as the postmodernists do - this strikes me as a childish, undialectical attitude, even a dangerous, willful blindness.  Yet I have to admit that there are persuasive aspects of their argument.  I would say that there is an element of truth to what they say, but it is a one-sided truth. Perhaps we might say: nature exists, including human nature, but it lacks something: the Graeco-Roman western tradition would call that which it lacks "being" - and there is a kind of truth to this old-fashioned expression.  To use Levinas's phrase, nature is "otherwise than being."  Rather than being, nature is pure becoming .  That is, it lacks permanence, regularity, constancy.  It is not a "form" in the Platonic sense.   Where does human nature come from?  Evolution - both Darwinian, biological evolution and cultural evolution, which are inextricably bound up with each other among humans.  Our cultures have evolved to ada...